From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 13 Jan 93 19:53:23 GMT From: agate!spool.mu.edu!yale.edu!think.com!spdcc!iecc!compilers-sender@ucbvax. Berkeley.EDU (Eliot Moss) Subject: Re: Compiler Construction in Ada Message-ID: <93-01-090@comp.compilers> List-Id: I have taught a compiler course four times, and much prefer having the students learn to use an off the shelf parser generator (yacc/bison style). I do have them write a lexer themselves -- it's actually easier for many languages, since lex is a bit tricky to use and get comments, etc., right. Reacting to previous postings, I don't think deep understanding of the syntactic aspects is quite the important thing. It is much more important to gain understanding of type checking, semantic processing in general, code generation, and the role of optimization, in my opinion. Many people concentrate on the syntactic stuff because it's clean and theoretical, but the tools make it by the far the easiest part of compiling, so to me it does not seem the smart place to spend limited classroom time. Just one professor's view, but it seems to work. -- J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor Visiting Associate Professor Department of Computer Science School of Computer Science Lederle Graduate Research Center Carnegie Mellon University University of Massachusetts 5000 Forbes Avenue Amherst, MA 01003 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 (413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax) (412) 268-6767, 681-5739 (fax) Moss@cs.umass.edu Moss@cs.cmu.edu -- Send compilers articles to compilers@iecc.cambridge.ma.us or {ima | spdcc | world}!iecc!compilers. Meta-mail to compilers-request.