Topics List for Qualifying Examination: Compilers

The syllabus for this area is the same as the syllabus of the Compilers course that Dr. Auguston has given, and reproduced below, EXCEPT that RIGAL is excluded.

The main text will be te book by Holub (which is essentially similar to that of the Aho, Sethi and Ullman book but with more C code).

Special Topics ("Compiler Construction"), Fall 1993
CS 479, CS 579 (3 credits)

Contact

Dr. Mikhail Auguston

Course Synopsis

Motivation. Examples of translation. Phases of translation.
Grammars and formal languages, finite automata, push-down automata. Syntax graphs.
Lexical analysis.
Data structures used by compiler. Hash tables, search trees, stacks.
Syntax analysis. Top-down parsing, LL-parsers, FIRST and FOLLOW sets. Recursive descent method. Bottom-up parsing. LR- parsers. Construction of LR parser tables. Error handling.
Syntax - directed translation. Attribute grammars. Semantic analysis.
Intermediate code representation. Code generation. Run-time organization, memory management.
Intermediate code representation, peep-hole optimization, dataflow analysis and global optimization.
Compiler design tools. Lex & Yacc. RIGAL.

References

Aho, Sethi, Ullman, Compilers, Addison-Wesley, 1986.
Holub, Compiler design in C, Prentice Hall, 1990. and some additional papers on the topic to be distributed in the class.
Andrew Appel, Modern Compiler Implementation in C, Cambridge University Press, 1998