Compilers and Interpreters

Catalog description

You know how to program, but do you know how to implement a programming language? In this course you'll learn how to build a compiler. Topics covered include: lexical analysis, grammars and parsing, intermediate representations, syntax-directed translation, code generation, type checking, simple dataflow and control-flow analyses, and optimizations. Along the way, we study objects and inheritance, first-class functions (closures), data representation and runtime-support issues such as garbage collection. This is a challenging, implementation-oriented course in which students build a full compiler from a simple, typed object-oriented language to fully operational x86 assembly. The course projects are implemented using OCaml, but no knowledge of OCaml is assumed.