Re: How to justify teaching compilers

  =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=FCrgen_Kahrs?= <Juergen.Kahrs@vr-web.de> schreibt:


>Niklaus Wirth had no problems to introduce his students to compiler
>construction with a book of 94 pages:


This was possible only by omission of the really important areas. With
LL(1) languages a recursive descent parser can be hand crafted, and a
reduction to P-code wipes away almost all allocation and optimization
problems in code generation. Such specialized models are suitable for
introductory courses, to show the students how easy compiler
construction can be, with an appropriate design of a language and
runtime environment.


But unfortunately not everybody is such a genious designer like Wirth,
who has the implementation in his head prior to the specification of
the language or OS. And unfortunately there exist languages like
C/C++, that deserve different parsing techniques. And this IMO is the
reason why teaching compilers cannot be restricted to teaching how to
design an easily implementable model (language...), instead the
students should learn the more sophisticated techniques, required to
deal with real life languages and environments.


To prevent misunderstandings: I'm a fan of Wirth and Pascal (Delphi),
as long as I don't have to deal with other peoples languages...


DoDi

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