Objectives

At the end of this course on Compiler Construction, the student should be able to

• Understand the two models of language processing, viz. compilers and interpreters, and realize their strengths and limitations.

• Understand the influence of various features of programming languages and machine architectures on the efficiency of language translation.

• Appreciate the role of lexical analysis in compilation, understand the theory behind design of lexical analysers and lexical analyser generators, and be able to use Lex to generate lexical analysers.

• Be proficient in writing grammars to specify syntax, understand the theories behind different parsing strategies - their strengths and limitations, understand how the generation of parsers can be automated, and be able to use Yacc to generate parsers.

• Understand the error detection capabilities of a compiler and how to report them in a user friendly manner.

• Understand the need for various static semantic analyses such as declaration processing, type checking, and intermediate code generation, and be able to perform such analysis in a syntax directed fashion through the use of attribute grammars.

• Understand the issues involved in allocation of memory to data objects, and the relation of such issues with higher level language features such as data types, scope and nesting rules, and recursion.

• Understand the key issues in the generation of efficient code for a given architecture.

• Understand the role played by code optimisation.