book followup on Lee's ``Realistic Compiler Generation''

I saved this article a couple of years ago and never followed up.
What did people think of the book and of the approach in general?
What is the book's ISBN number?


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From: worley@compass.com (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: MESS book
Date: 15 Nov 89 19:32:30 GMT


Realistic Compiler Generation by P. Lee, MIT Press 121-41-7, $32.50


Here's the blurb from MIT Press' catalog:


Peter Lee provides a complete description and survey of the field of
semantics-based compiler generation and presents a new method for
expressing the formal semantics of programming languages that allows
realistic compilers to be generated automatically.


The method Lee describes has two main advantages over previous
methods. First, it allows compilers to be generated automatically.
The compilers are realistic in the sense that they compile programs as
efficiently as hand-crafted compilers do, and the object programs they
produce run as efficiently as the object programs produced by
hand-crafted compilers. The second advantage is that it makes it
easier to comprehend and write the semantics than other methods.


The book demonstrates a working compiler generator called MESS which
is used to generate a realistic compiler for a Pascal-like language.
The generated compiler is then compared with several hand-crated
compilers and shown to have at least comparable, and in some cases
superior, performance.
[The ISBN is 0-262-12141-7, MIT Press order code LEERH. I don't know if
it's still in print. Not a bad book, though the compiler he builds is far
from industrial strength. -John]
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