Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

[agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state]

moss@cs.cmu.edu (Eliot Moss) writes:
>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.

dtl8v@holmes.acc.Virginia.EDU (Heracleitus) writes:
>  I have to agree with this point of view.  I took a class in programming
>languages that involved writing a nearly-full front end for a Unity

Just another student's point of view:

I took a compilers class where we wrote a simple lexical analyzer, then a
simple parser from scratch.  We then took a skeleton tiny-c lex/yacc
definition and expanded on it to the point of having a working compiler
(including peephole optimizations, not including the assembler). 

This seemed to give a proper perspective on how important tools (lex/yacc)
can be, while at the same time not wasting too much time implementing
something which could better by done by the tools.
-- 
Adam G.
adamg@microware.com, or ...!uunet!mcrware!adamg
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