Compiler and Language-Processing Tools

Organization

Exam: The oral exams will be held on February 20 and March 26./26. Please register with the examination office and our secretary Mrs Stengel for a time slot.

Lecture: Tuesday, 11:45 - 13:15, Room 48-453; Wednesday 11:45 - 13:15, 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: alternating with the lecture, see time table below

Additional support session: Friday, 15:30-16:30, Room 32-411-PC (starting on November 16)

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

Prerequisites:

• Good programming knowledge in Java (or similar language)

Instructors

• Dr. Annette Bieniusa will give the lecture.
• The exercises will be supervised by Peter Zeller.

Time Table

This plan is only preliminary and is likely to change during the semester.

Lecture material

Exercise material