A set of tools to teach compiler construction

Abstract

Compiler construction is a widely used software engineering exercise, but because most students will not be compiler writers, care must be taken to make it relevant in a core curriculum. Auxiliary tools, such as generators and interpreters, often hinder the learning: students have to fight tool idiosyncrasies, mysterious errors, and other poorly educative issues. We introduce a set of tools especially designed or improved for compiler construction educative projects in C ++ . We also provide suggestions about new approaches to compiler construction. We draw guidelines from our experience to make tools suitable for education purposes.

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“…Demaille et al [25] present their selection of tools for dealing with a massive course (up to 250 students) while manage and facilitate evaluation of student projects, to highlight some rarely used features that enhance (compiler construction) learning. Kundra and Sureka [26] presents their Case-Based and Project-Based Learning Approaches on compiler design concepts.…”

“…The implementation language also varies. Some use ANSI C [20], C++ [19,3,25], Java [21,22], Objective Caml [31], Scheme [34], Perl [18], and Python [13] (this last is not educative, but it is relevant). The target architecture/target assembly language also differs.…”

“…Some educative compilers are very specialized for specific hardware, like GAMA32 processors [13], or TINYCPU/Spartan-3 [18]. Another are defined for produce executable object code for more popular architectures like SPARC [31], RISC [36], MIPS [19,16,25], or Intel-PC assembler [20,21,3]. Even some of them design their own pseudo-assembly language, like Evangelidis et al's [35] (similar to PL/0 Machine instruction set).…”

“…The students must to construct compiler using that back-end, and to program some simple computer games in it. Demaille et al [25] propose to use many minilanguages using several auxiliary computer-aided tools both to construct compilers and to evaluate compilers partial source code from students. Kundra and Sureka [26] have designed their course around "real-life situation" case-based projects, to achieve meaningful learning.…”

“…Compiler design courses often use compiler-writing tools to simplify projects, ranging from LEX and YACC to more modern tools, like report [20], [35], [3], [25], [18], [23], and [26]. But because these tools deliberately hide many of the details of how a compiler works to the programmers, they do not aid a course whose goal is to develop an understanding of those workings.…”