compiler construction CS-4141

Passes of a Compiler. Lexical Analysis, Specification of Tokens, Recognition of Tokens, Top-down Parsing, Predictive Parsing, Recursive Descent Parsing, LL Parsing, LL Pasing Table Construction, Left Factoring, Bottom-up Parsing, Shift-Reduce Parsing, LR(1) Parsing, LR(1) Canonical Collection of Items, LR(1) Parsing, Shift-Reduce Conflicts, LALR Parsing, Parser Generators – YACC, Sematic Analysis, Attribute Grammars, Ad-hoc scheme for attribute grammars, Intermediate Representation (IR), Intermediate Representation taxonomy, Syntax-directed translation: assignment statement, Code Generation, Code Optimization.

Course Synopsis

The course introduces the students to the operation of a modern compiler that translates code in a programming language into machine code. Special emphasis is placed on the actual construction of a compiler by working on a project that builds a compiler for a language that is a subset of C++. Modern compilers operate in three passes. These are front-end, middle end and back end. Given a program written in a programming language, the front end carries out syntax analysis of input program. The middle end performs code optimization so that the eventual executable program will require less memory and will be efficient at runtime. The back end generates actual assembly language code for the target machine. We will study mechanics of the three stages. However, due to the introductory nature of the course, we will spend majority of the time on syntax analysis and code generation. We will touch upon optimization briefly. The course provides a practical opportunity to see how concepts and techniques from various areas of Computer Science come together to build a useful tool.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the course, you should be able to