Compiler Physiology for Beginners

Understanding and writing compilers for languages such as Pascal is ineteresting and rewarding. Mick Farmer gives you both insight into major areas of Compiler Physiology and practical knowledge of a working compiler for a sunset of Pascal.

Basic topics covered in this book include Grammars and Language, regular Expressions and Lexical Analysis, Top-down parsing, and Bottom-up parsing. More advanced topics discussed by the author are LR(k) Grammars and Parsers, Semantic Analysis, Code Generation, and Optimisation. Assignements at the end of each chapter guide your furtherreading and suggest modifications or extensions to the working compiler used as an example throughout the text.

Mick Farmer places great emphasis on the use of compiler writing tools and includes practical examples of the use of LEX and YACC, two such tools available on the popular UNIX operating system.

The material is based on the Compiler Writing Course taught by the author at Birkbeck College for the past three years.

1. Grammars and Languages
2. Regular Expressions and Lexical Analysis
3. The Mini-Pascal Scanner
4. LEX and the Scanner
5. Top-Down Parsing
6. Metcalfe's Syntax Machine
7. The Mini-Pascal Syntax Analyser
8. Bottom-Up Parsing
9. LR(k) Grammars and Parsers
10. YACC
11. Semantic Analysis
12. Code generation
13. Optimisation
14. Compiler Engineering

• Appendix A: Syntax Diagrams for Mini-Pascal
• Appendix B: The Syntax of Mini-Pascal in BNF
• Appendix C: The Mini-Pascal Header Files
• Appendix D: The Mini-Pascal Scanner Written in C
• Appendix E: The Mini-Pascal Scanner Written in LEX
• Appendix F: The Mini-Pascal C Files
• Appendix G: The Mini-Pascal Makefile
• Appendix H: The Mini-Pascal Run-Time Support Module

If you want to be bored to death (and beyond), read this.