This book is designed primarily for use as a textbook in a one-semester course on Compiler Design for undergraduate students and beginning graduate students.
There are several different approaches to parsing, but in keeping with the focus on a one-semester course, this book emphasizes only one approach, recursive descent parsing with several lookahead tokens..
One very important component of a Compiler is the parser, which verifies that a source program conforms to the language syntax and produces an intermediate representation of the program that is suitable for additional analysis and code generation.
Students require access only to a Java Compiler and a text editor, but most students will want to use Java with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
No special compiler-related tools are required or used within the book.
Both an assembler and an emulator for the virtual machine are provided on the course web site.
This Approach greatly simplifies code generation.
The target language is assembly language for a virtual machine with a stack-based architecture, similar to but much simpler than the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
It has basic data types, arrays, procedures, functions, and parameters, but it relegates many other interesting language features to the project exercises.
The source language being compiled is relatively simple, but it is powerful enough to be interesting and challenging.
Compiler theory is kept to a minimum, but the project orientation retains the fun part of studying compilers.
The book has a narrow focus as a project-oriented course on compilers.
Following are some of the decisions made in order to accommodate the goals of this book.
A complete study of compilers could easily fill several graduate-level courses, and therefore some simplifications and compromises are necessary for a one-semester course that is accessible to undergraduate students.
The only prerequisites for this book are familiarity with basic algorithms and data structures (lists, maps, recursion, etc.), a rudimentary knowledge of computer architecture and assembly language, and some experience with the Java programming language.
This book is designed primarily for use as a textbook in a one-semester course on Compiler Design for undergraduate students and beginning graduate students
