CS 445 - Compilers - Fall 2009

Text: Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice by Kenneth Louden, ISBN: 0534939724, Published by Brooks and Cole

Class Description

An introduction to compiler design and construction. This is a hands-on compiler construction course in which each student will work independently to construct a compiler that actually compiles a rather complex C like language including recursive functions and arrays. The student will be carefully guided toward a successful completion by working on incremental development and testing of the compiler.

Goals:

1. Understand the basic theory of languages and techniques for simple language translation.
2. Understand the features of compilers and interpreters.
3. Understand why compilers behave as they do and why languages may be designed the way they are in response to compiler constraints.
4. Understand the basic components and layered design of a compiler and the rational for their use.
5. Each student will be responsible for independently building a simple compiler for a virtual machine and augment it with new features. The compiler will handle typing, procedure invocation, arrays, recursion, optimization, global and local scope, etc. The instructor will help the student to achieve this goal over a series of assignments, but it is up to the student to keep up with the assignments and complete each on time.

CS445 Class Schedule by Week

Wk#	In-Class Week	Topics/Links	Assignments	Comments
1	Aug 24	Introduction to the class, what we plan on doing, how the class works, where to find stuff. How is a compiler organized.
2	Aug 31	Scanners and how they are defined, grammars, intro to flex and bison	Read Chapter 1, assignment 1
3	Sep 7	more on scanners, UNIX tools for homework submission, syntactic analysis	Read Chapter 2	NO CLASS ON MONDAY
4	Sep 14	Context Free Grammar review, Intro to LL(1) parsing	Read Chapter 3
5	Sep 21	First and Follow sets, formal LL(1) development	Read Chapter 4, assignment 2
6	Sep 28	various LR parsings and getting bison to build your syntax tree, grammar conditioning such as removing left recursion	Read Chapter 5
7	Oct 5	More on LR parsing and syntax trees
8	Oct 13	Symbol tables, type checking, and discuss what you need to know to do assignment 3	Assignment 3, Read Chapter 6	TEST TUESDAY over chapts 1-5
9	Oct 19	attribute grammars and how to finish out our syntax tree
10	Oct 26	discuss assignment 3		No Class Oct 21 and 23
11	Nov 2	Using the error token in Bison, start looking at the Tiny Virtual Machine	Assignment 4
12	Nov 9	More on the virtual machine and assignment 4
13	Nov 16	Memory allocation and code generation	Read Chapter 7, Assignment 5
14	Nov 23	More on code generation, extensions to C- that are common in many languages but that we won't actually include.
15	Nov 30		FALL BREAK
16	Dec 7	Optimizations in general, local optimizations, code selection, register allocation, How to add more features to C- such as strings, prototypes, and for statements, how to build linkers and loaders	code generation assignment due this coming weekend!!!
17	Dec 14	Final		Final Exam Friday Dec 17 3:30-5:30pm

Service Links

• Class Policies and Helpful Advice
• Homework submission page
• Compile C- examples
• The test data page
• Disability support statement: Reasonable accommodations are available for students who have a documented disability. Please notify your instructor during the first week of class regarding accommodation(s) needed for the course. All accommodations must be approved through Disability Support Services.
• Description of your emailed grade report

Documentation

• A Tutorial on Grammars
• A Regular Expression Reference
• The Grammar for the Tiny Language
• The Grammar for the C- Language
• A Make Primer
• A Flex Primer
• A Bison Primer
• The Bison Manual (1992 version of the book) for version 1.20
• The Bison Manual (2002 version of the book) for version 1.35
• Building LL parser using first and follow sets
• A list of Bottom up Parser Algorithms
• A discussion of the difference between SLR and LR parsers using an example
• Examples of Bison Parser Errors and Fixes
• The getopt man page
• A getopt example program
• A getopt replacement that does what gnu getopt does but you can compile anywhere.
• A detailed discussion of the dangling else problem
• Using the error token in Bison
• A gdb (Gnu Debugger) Primer
• The TM 2.7 reference card
• A tool for displaying the derivation of your source code from your grammar using the debugging output of the bison parser.
• Some Simple TM Code Examples
• Some examples of code generation
• A code generator walk through

Code

• calc.l
• calc.y
• calc-makefile
• Parser code reading
• A tar of the code for the Tiny compiler from the book
• TM 2.7 the tiny machine version 2.7. Save this file using "save target as" or "save link target as" or similar browser command. See the comments in the file header for compilation instructions. Use this version of the virtual machine and not the one supplied by Louden. This has way more features.

Cool Links

• Cygwin in case you want that comfortable UNIX feel on your Windows box. This will give you a command shell and numerous UNIX tools for Windows.
• LCC a retargetable free C compiler with lots of goodies.
• A list of over 2500 computer languages
• Zebu A parser generator for generating Common Lisp code