If I were in charge of the computer science curriculum at a college or university ...

Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
Sun, 19 Jun 2022 11:54:03 +0000

          From comp.compilers
Related articles
| List of all articles for this month |
From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2022 11:54:03 +0000
Organization: Compilers Central
Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="25253"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com"
Keywords: courses, question, comment
Posted-Date: 20 Jun 2022 18:08:25 EDT

Hi Folks,


If I were in charge of the computer science curriculum at a college or
university I would require students to first take a course on how to create
lexers and parsers using a parser generator (e.g., Flex and Bison) before
taking a course on compilers.


For the last many months I have been immersed in learning Flex and Bison
(great fun!). Recently I have started reading the dragon compiler book. As I
read it, I come across things in it and think "Ah, that's why Flex/Bison does
that." But I also come across things and think "Oh man, I never would have
understood what that is saying if I didn't know Flex/Bison." The dragon book
is filling in gaps in my understanding of Flex/Bison, while simultaneously
Flex/Bison is filling in gaps in the dragon book's explanation. Synergy!


I believe that some of you are on the faculty at colleges and universities. Is
this how your curriculum works?


/Roger
[When I was teaching a compilers course back in the late 1970s I talked about
lex and flex when we covered regular expressions and DFAs, and about yacc when
we covered LR parsing. They're just tools, not worth a separate course. -John]

Post a followup to this message

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.