Re: textbooks and University Degrees in Compiler Design.

> >For that matter, can *anyone* on the newsgroup tell us what the texts
> >they prefer are?


For a first course which spends time on the front end as well as
optimizations, the 'dragon book' has yet to be beaten.


Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in [your favorite
implementation language here]" is something to consider if you want
just a taste of OO or functional programming in your first course.


For second courses in compilers covering scalar optimizations, there
have just begun to be textbooks. At the present time Muchnick's
"Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" has too many bugs in the
pseudocode, examples, and even some of the discussion to make it a
primary textbook at this point. I hope that he will take on a
co-author to bring out a better second edition -- the cookbook
approach that Muchnick uses can be good once the bugs are shaken out,
but it must be a time consuming job. Morgan's "Designing an
Optimizing Compiler" is reasonably bug free and interesting reading.


For parallelization issues, the two Michael Wolfe (no relation that I
know of) books are interesting.


Beyond this level you tend to get into a careful selection of classic
and current research papers for teaching.


-- Allyn Dimock
--

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