Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

[world!iecc!compilers-sender@uunet.uu.net (Brent Burton)]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
|The original poster, Prof. Jipping, prefers the hand-coding approach, on the
|grounds (I suppose) that using tools is great once you have some
|understanding of how they work. Students who have hand-coded parts of
|parsers and lexers really come to appreciate what yex/yacc/aflex/ayacc buy
|you, and that's just the right education for undergraduates (IMHO). 

I couldn't agree more.

Last spring I took the compiler design class here and I found it to be an
excellent class.  We used the Dragon book and a hand-coded approach while
the language to compile was a subset of Pascal.

This format proved to be quite effective and educational.  Through
previous work at IBM, I had experience with lex and yacc already and a
good understanding of the parsing process.  However, the hand-coding
approach was, I feel, mandatory to learn the important underlying
algorithms and to better understand the roles lex and yacc play.  After
the the discussion about LL and LALR parsers, I could finally understand
the shift/reduce and reduce/reduce errors. ;-)

In short, I'd suggest the hand-coding approach.  Learning definitely comes
from doing, and the lex and yacc-based course doesn't provide that extra
depth of knowledge.

-Brent, waiting anxiously for the graduate compiler design this spring
-- 
Brent Burton    N5VMG, bpb9204@tamsun.tamu.edu
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