Re: Wanted: introductory book on compiler construction

Oliver Plohmann <opl@esec.ch> writes:


>I looking for an introductory/beginner level book on compiler
>construction. I have found some interesting books. Unhappily, I
>haven't found one that describes a compiler for an Intel box. I don't


Yep there is such a book:


"Writing Compilers And Interpreters: An Applied Approach", Ronald Mak
Wiley Professional Computing, ISBN 0-471-55580-0


This book is NOT the book to go to for advanced theories; it simply
shows how to develop a simple pascal compiler and a basic run-time
system. It generates 8086 assembly code. Source for the compiler is
included. The book starts out by developing an interpreter while it
is giving the basics of recursive-descent parsing, and only later gets
into code generation. The compiler does NOT output .obj files (that's
a whole other topic) but you can assemble the files the compiler
creates and run them if you want to.


Also, I've recently retargetted a C compiler for the 386. Code
generation is the simple part unless you are into hefty
optimizations... the bulk of such compilers lies in creating internal
data structures suitable for analysis (during optimization). If you
want you can get it from:


ftp.std.com:/pub/os-code/cc.zip


but you are pretty much on your own figuring out how it works.


David
[There's a very unfavorable review of Mak's book in the FAQ, the main
complaint being that the code in the is very buggy and won't work. -John]
--

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