Compiler topics

hammondr@sungod.crd.ge.com (Richard A Hammond)
Wed, 11 May 1994 16:36:56 GMT

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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: hammondr@sungod.crd.ge.com (Richard A Hammond)
Keywords: courses
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 94-05-018
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 16:36:56 GMT

ellard@endor.harvard.edu (Dan Ellard) writes:


>If you had a six hours of lecture time to discuss compilers, what would
>you cover?


I suggest that you spend more time on the general topic of languages and
language parsing. I'm sick of dealing with all the little languages I run
into in various applications which are parsed by hand written code and
which therefore are very inflexible. The authors of the program have
defined a little language, and if they understood how to use lex and yacc
they could have quickly handled the language and done things nicely, e.g.
allow comments, handle numbers in a variety of formats, allow white space,
generalized formatting, ...


I don`t know what your class already knows nor what the overall objectives
of your course are, but I suspect very few of them will ever write
compilers. On the other hand, many of them might design little languages.
Making them more aware of the power of the tools available and how it
makes their own software more robust is very important.


This is my own opinion, not GE's.
Richard Hammond, GE CRD, Schenectady, NY., 518.387.7478
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