Compiler and Language-Processing Tools

Organization

Lecture: Tuesday, 11:45 - 13:15, Room 48-453, Wednesday 10:00 - 11:30, Room 42-105

In addition to the lecture there will be practical exercises. In the practical exercises, the topics of the lecture are put into a practical perspective by constructing a compiler from scratch. The practical exercises will not influence the final grade, however they are mandatory to be admitted to the final examination.

Exercise session: Tuesday, 11:45 - 13:15, Room 48-453 (alternating with the lecture)

Additional support session: tba

The first practical exercise sheet will be given out during the first lecture and the last exercise sheet during the last lecture. Therefore you should plan to spend 2 more weeks after the last lecture for completing the last exercise sheet.

As this is a 8CP lecture, you should plan to spend around 240 hours on the lecture and the practical exercises. If you do not have much experience with implementing bigger projects in Java, you should plan to spend more time on the practical exercises. If you lack some of the theoretical prerequisites (definition of formal languages, regular expressions, context-free grammars, finite-state machines, pushdown automata), you should also incorporate this into your planning.

The lecture will be held in English.

Topics of the Lecture

Syntax specification of programming and formal languages
Lexical analysis: scanning, scanner generation, application of scanner generators
Context free analyses: parsing, parser generation, application of parser generators
Design and use of abstract syntax
Context sensitive analysis: name analysis, type analysis, attribution techniques and tools
Processing of XML documents
Compilation techniques for procedural and object-oriented languages
Intermediate languages for compilation
Semantical aspects and optimization techniques
Instruction selection
Register assignment
Code generation
Automatic memory management and garbage collection