Re: why teach about compilers, was Java compiler courses

Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote:
> By the way, if I were teaching a compiler course, I would use OCaml or
> Ada, neither of which is perfect. I would not use C or C++, and
> probably not Java. As others have said, the goal is to teach general
> principles about compilers, not to waste time fooling about with
> low-level debugging.


What I'm wondering is: assuming that compilers is being taught to
students in their third or fourth year of a CS degree program, why
would one pick a language? Wouldn't one simply give them a project
and let them decide how to do it? Since everyone is in such agreement
that the goal should be to teach general concepts and not low-level
programming details, why is there this inexplicable consensus that one
has to pick a programming language?


I took a compilers course that didn't specify a language. I wrote a
compiler in Haskell; others used C, Java, C#, VB, or whatever. I seem
to recall that one poor soul decided to use Perl, but he made his own
choice and he got things done in the end. The course I took also
banned third-party code generator tools; I guess if you needed to
teach some specific lex/yacc-ish products, that would be a reason to
pick a language. If you teach the algorithms, though, they are
largely independent of language.


--
Chris Smith
[A few years back when I was taking my first compiler course, the assignment
was to compile some subset of APL into Basic. Everyone else wrote their
compiler in APL, I wrote mine in Trac, and as I recall, mine was the only
one that ever generated a working translation. -John]

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