Compiler Tools v. C

I would like some advice from some of you Old-Dog-Compiler-Designers :)


I have resently built a Level 0 Pascal compiler in C. It included Lexical,
syntax, and semantic analyzer phases. Additionaly, it had full Symbol-Table
Managment and rudementry error handling routines. Because of time restraints,
only On-The-Fly code generation was possible, thus stuff like DAGs and
Peephole optimization was not attempted. Shortly I will be submitting my
proposal for a Bachelor Thesis (8 months of work), and I have decided to
continue my work in compilers.


I know that compiler tools are used a lot in industry, and I will pick up
these skills in grad school or else where. My question is similar to the
debate on how much C should be learned before jumping to C++. Would a student
gain more insight through developing a proper back end in C rather than
makeing the jump to YACC? The obvious assumption that I have made is that
tools will hide the nitty-gritty implementation details. Is this assumption
justifyed, and if so, do the imlementation details of the back end warrent
8 months of undergrad research?


Thanks for the advice, John


Name: John Frankovich *
School: University of Calgary *
Email: johnf@cpsc.ucalgary.ca *
Major: Computer Science (grad 95) *
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