Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

I have taught a compiler course four times, and much prefer having the
students learn to use an off the shelf parser generator (yacc/bison
style). I do have them write a lexer themselves -- it's actually easier
for many languages, since lex is a bit tricky to use and get comments,
etc., right.


Reacting to previous postings, I don't think deep understanding of the
syntactic aspects is quite the important thing. It is much more important
to gain understanding of type checking, semantic processing in general,
code generation, and the role of optimization, in my opinion. Many people
concentrate on the syntactic stuff because it's clean and theoretical, but
the tools make it by the far the easiest part of compiling, so to me it
does not seem the smart place to spend limited classroom time.


Just one professor's view, but it seems to work.
--
J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor Visiting Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science School of Computer Science
Lederle Graduate Research Center Carnegie Mellon University
University of Massachusetts 5000 Forbes Avenue
Amherst, MA 01003 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
(413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax) (412) 268-6767, 681-5739 (fax)
Moss@cs.umass.edu Moss@cs.cmu.edu
--

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