Making Compiler Design Revelant to Students

Making Compiler Design Revelant to Students

Saumya Debray, from the University of Arizona, wrote an article stating and explaining the different phases and jobs a compiler must go through in order to successfully translate a high level programming language into assembly or machine language in order for computers to understand the code and process it as asked.

He mentions different processes that take place through the compilation: beginning by the lexic analysis, it explains the compiler goes character by character recognizing all the special chars. This process is really expensive, therefore there are a lot of processes and methods to make this a more efficient and fast work.

Then it all goes through the syntax process, where it is all further processed and recognized as words or phrases which are used to understand the code. Regular expressions are particularly useful in this phase.

Then comes the more complex semantic phase, where according to the grammar specifications the compiler must give a meaning and order to the words recognized in the syntax process.

It all generates into code, taking special care of reserved words and typos that help the compiler understand the behaviour of the code and the expected outcome, and finally goes through an optimization process to have the less amount of code, memory used, and processes created.

What resulted to me the more interesting and encouraging was the premise of the author that many people (mostly students that lack experience and knowledge) tend to underestimate the compilers class because they find it useless as they are likely never to write or create one. However through different examples of problems, he showed how regardless of the subject, the knowledge and technical skills behind a compiler can be applied to solve several cases and challenges in the industry, opening my mind and looking up to learn more about compilers and search how it relates to other subjects and concepts I've seen in the career previously.