Teaching The Compilers Course

摘要

I've always enjoyed teaching the compilers course. Compiler design is a beautiful marriage of theory and practice ~ it is one of the first major areas of systems programming for which a strong theoretical foundation has developed that is now routinely used in practice. I am a strong believer in Donald Knuth's credo: "Theory and practice are not mutually exclusive; they are intimately connected. They live together and support each other" [5]. In the past five decades, a number of forces have evolved the traditional compilers course in a computer science curriculum [6]. This article looks at how compilers courses have responded to these forces since their inception. I've organized the evolution based on material in the four books on compilers that I have coauthored and used in compilers courses over the last three decades [1-4]. Many of the earliest compilers courses put a heavy emphasis on the theory of parsing and syntax-directed translation. However, it we quickly realized that just focusing on the theory does not necessarily teach students how to build a useful compiler. This observation was positively reinforced by my interactions with the exceptionally talented researchers in the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs where I worked right after graduation. I began my career there as a computer science theorist after creating indexed grammars and nested stack automata for my PhD thesis at Princeton. With the excitement surrounding the invention of Unix, C, and C++ around me, however, I quickly became involved in the wonderful opportunities for the fruitful symbiosis of theory and practice in systems and compilers.