CS712/CS812
Compiler Design
Spring 2004
MWF 2:10-3pm, Nesmith 329

Instructor: P. Hatcher
Office: Nesmith 310A
Phone: 862-2678
E-mail: hatcher@unh.edu
Office Hours: MWF 1:30-2:00pm, Fri 3:00-4:00pm, or by appointment (send e-mail to request an appointment).

The pre-requisite (or co-requisite) for this course is CS671. However, students should also have familiarity with the material from CS611.

This course has two major objectives:

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

Grading

The major portion (70%) of your course grade will be based upon a large project. You will design a simple object-oriented language and implement a compiler for the language that generates code for the Intel IA-32 architecture.

Tentatively, the project will consist of five phases:

  1. language design - due February 8 (10%).

  2. compiler design, scanner and parser - due February 29 (10%).

  3. semantic analysis - due March 28 (15%).

  4. code generation - due April 20 (15%).

  5. critique, test and improve - due May 9 (20%).

Each project assignment will be worth 100 points. Project assignments may be handed in late at a penalty of 2 points for one day late, 5 points for two days late, 10 points for three days late, 20 points for four days late, and 40 points for five days late. No program may be turned in more than 5 days late. An assignment is not considered late unless turned in after 8am on the day after the due date.

Projects may either be done individually or in a group of two. Groups will be expected to do more work and each member of a group will normally be awarded the same grade. Groups, once formed, will normally be expected to stay intact for the full semester. Groups must be formed prior to 5pm on Friday January 30. To form a group, send me e-mail with the names of the two members of your group.

There will be three homework assignments given during the semester.

  1. Homework 1 is a written assignment concerning language specification.
  2. Homework 2 is a written assignment concerning LR parsing.
  3. Homework 3 is a written assignment concerning LL parsing.
The homework (in total) will be worth 9% of your course grade. Each assignment will be worth 3%.

The rest (21%) 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 14 3:30-5:30pm in Nesm 329. 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:

Textbooks

There is no required textbook for this course.

On reserve in the Engineering, Math and Computer Science library in New Hampshire Hall:

I do not think you need to purchase any of the above books. Access to the copies on reserve in the library should be sufficient. However, if you want to order your own copies of any of the books on reserve, I suggest Quantum Books or Amazon.com Books.

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

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:

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

The UNH CIS server turing.unh.edu is the primary computing resource for this course. You should automatically be given an account on this machine. During the semester you may use any other machines that you have access to, but for grading purposes your programs must execute on turing.unh.edu.

Last modified on April 16, 2004.

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