CS712/CS812
Compiler Design
Spring 2003

Instructor: P. Hatcher
Office: Kingsbury M111
Phone: 862-2678
E-mail: hatcher@unh.edu
Office Hours: MWF 9:00-10:00am, MWF 1:30-2:00pm, Fri 3:00-4:00pm, or by appointment (send e-mail to request an appointment).

The prerequisite for this course is CS671. However, students should also have familiarity with the material from CS611.

This course has two major objectives:

• The first objective comprises the items listed in the formal course description (in the UNH course catalog). That is, you will learn how modern compilers are designed and implemented (and also a bit about the difficulties of designing languages).

• The second objective of the course is for you to improve your software engineering skills by:
  • working with a system involving thousands of lines of code;
  • working with a system written partially by others;
  • working with a system for which testing is nontrivial; and,
  • working with program generation tools.

An outline of the material covered by this course is given here.

Grading

Tentatively, the project will consist of six phases:

1. type representation - due February 9.

2. declarations - due March 2.

3. expressions - due March 30.

4. statements - due April 13.

5. pointers, arrays, structs and unions - due April 27.

6. compile the compiler - due May 11.

Each project phase will be worth 12% of your course grade. However, the project phases are not of equal difficulty. Phases 2 and 3 are particularly challenging. It is important that you start early on these two phases.

With the exception of phase 1, project assignments may be handed in late at a penalty of 5 points per day up to one week late. No late submissions will be accepted for project phase 1. An assignment is not considered late unless turned in after 8am on the day after the due date.

Code written for this course should conform to these conventions.

There will be two homework assignments given during the semester.

1. Homework 1 is a written assignment concerning LL parsing.
2. Homework 2 is a written assignment concerning LR parsing.

The rest (22%) of your course grade will be based upon a final examination. This examination will be comprehensive and will be closed book. The final exam will be Friday May 16 8-10am in Kingsbury 319. A sample final exam is available as a Postscript document on the CIS machines in ~cs712/public/sample-final.ps.

In summary, your course grade will be determined in the following way:

• Programming Project - 72%
• Homework - 6%
• Final Examination - 22%

Textbooks

On reserve in the Kingsbury library:

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
  by Aho, Sethi and Ullman

• Introduction to Compiler Construction with Unix
  by Schreiner and Friedman

• C: A Reference Manual
  by Harbison and Steele
  (on the CS611 reserve list)

• The 1989 ANSI C Standard

O'Reilly and Associates publishes a good book on lex and yacc:

• Lex & Yacc by Mason, Brown and Levine (about $27)

We will be using the GNU versions of lex and yacc. There are GNU manuals for both flex and bison.

We will also use two manuals that I have downloaded from Intel's Developer Site:

• IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 1: Basic Architecture
• IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 2: Instruction Set Reference Manual

The manual for the GNU assembler will also be useful. (In particular, be aware that the syntax used by Intel differs from that used by the GNU assembler. See the relevant section of the GNU assembler manual.)

In addition, here is a guide for programming in Intel IA-32 assembler under Linux.

Finally, you will need to use gdb to debug both the compiler and the output of the compiler. The GNU manual for gdb is here. To debug at the assembly language level, read about the stepi/nexti commands, how to display registers, and the break *address command.

Computer Accounts

Comments and questions should be directed to hatcher@unh.edu