Entry #2: Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students

-
“Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler“ is an article written by Saumya Debray in which he invites the students to understand why the Compiler Design course is so important and explains that the professors should teach in a way that their students develop skills instead of the idea of just teaching knowledge.

The article shows that a compiler can be seen as a translator or as a process that can transform data expressed in one language into the same data expressed in another language. This comparison illustrates the similarity of the behavior, but also considering all the technical translation problems that can be found in common components of a language, such as ambiguity, context, and metaphors.

Based on this idea of a translator, we can better understand the phases that need to be executed to obtain a result these are: Lexical Analysis and Parsing, Semantic Analysis, Code Generation, and Code Parsing.

The Lexical Analysis divides the input into groups of adjacent characters called 'tokens'. Then, the Syntax Analysis is constructing sentences from the sequence of tokens obtained from the Lexical Analysis. The Semantical Analysis is computing, processing and propagating data that is not part of the context-free syntax of the given language and it gives meaning to the group of sentences from the previous step. 

In the Code Generation step, the translator passes through the tree representation of the program to generate machine code for the target machine. Optimization or Code Parsing is the last step and its purpose is to reduce the cost measure such as time of execution, size and battery consumption of the code.

Compilers design is very relevant because it brings a different perspective of how code is analyzed and how an algorithm is working to find a solution to a problem.

Debray, S. (n.d.). Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler. Recovered from http://34.212.143.74/s202011/tc3048/making_compiler_design_relevant_for_students.pdf

Comentarios

Publicar un comentario

Entradas populares de este blog

Entry #7: Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

-
“Building Server-Side Web Language Processors” is an article written by Ariel Ortiz, who is my professor during the Compilers Design course. The article talks about the advantages of building a language processor that actually runs on the web, instead of a processor that just runs on a command-line shell. Creating a web language processor can be a great challenge, as it requires to have knowledge in: Compilers design, Web server creation, Front-end design, and Security Management. The strategy used by the author consists of programming a web server from scratch and should be able to serve static resources and host a language processor that generates dynamic content based on the input and send the result to the client.  The implementation uses JavaServer Pages, which allows the processor to use custom tags, that are evaluated and produce an output. One of the advantages of this implementation is that the language processor has access to all the facilities provided by the hostin
Leer más

Entry #4: Internals of GCC

-
"Internals of GCC" is a 53 minutes long podcast produced in 2007 by Software Engineering Radio with Morgan Deters as guest. GCC is a set of compilers for various languages including ADA, C, C++, Fortran, Objective C and Java at one point.  GCC provides the whole infrastructure to build software in those languages mentioned before, going from Source Code to Assembly. GCC works in three main sections, each one works in a different aspect of the compiler: Front-End: In this section, the compiler acknowledges the language we are using to generate a tree structure that shows the program description and that will pass to the next section. Middle-End: In this section, the optimization of the tree passed from the Front-End section occurs. This section makes the code more efficient and makes a transformation to a more generic code, as it takes this generic form and converts it into low-level structures called Register Transfer Language (RTL). During this process, some optimi
Leer más