A compiler for teaching about compilers

D Baldwin - Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium …, 2003 - dl.acm.org
D Baldwin
Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, 2003dl.acm.org
Projects in which students write a small compiler are common in compiler design courses,
but even a small compiler can be daunting to students with no prior compiler-writing
experience. When I recently taught compiler design, I developed a very small language with
a highly modular compiler, focusing the project on implementing the core parts of a compiler
without requiring students to build all the infrastructure from scratch. This paper describes
the language and its compiler, and their successes (and occasional limitations) for teaching …
Projects in which students write a small compiler are common in compiler design courses, but even a small compiler can be daunting to students with no prior compiler-writing experience. When I recently taught compiler design, I developed a very small language with a highly modular compiler, focusing the project on implementing the core parts of a compiler without requiring students to build all the infrastructure from scratch. This paper describes the language and its compiler, and their successes (and occasional limitations) for teaching compiler design.
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