It surprises that they are still teaching parsing techniques that are based on limitation from 40 years ago, when memory was limited and you had to parse a file one character at the time. Why not start with a back-tracking recursive descent parser on a file stored in memory? Can be made efficient with some simple caching. In an introduction course there is no need to aim for maximum performance if parsing a 10k lines program takes less than a second.
by UncleOxidant
2 subcomments
The Essentials of Compilation book mentioned is only ~$24 on Amazon. Usually books like this are much more expensive. I ordered a copy.
by AdityaSanthosh
1 subcomments
Hi, seems like an interesting course. I haven't studied compilers in my undergrad( I'm an electronics student) but I have been working as a programmer who studied c and bit of low level languages. Is there any prerequisite compiler knowledge required for this course?
by evnix
1 subcomments
Most of these compiler projects and books would be 100x more popular and accessible if they were in Javascript
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