Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!husc6!necntc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!ima!johnl From: johnl@ima.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: Request comments on text. Message-ID: <611@ima.ISC.COM> Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 14:03:35 EDT Article-I.D.: ima.611 Posted: Mon Jul 6 14:03:35 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 15-Jul-87 00:55:44 EDT References: <252@hubcap.UUCP> Sender: johnl@ima.ISC.COM Reply-To: reid@sask.UUCP (Irving Reid) Organization: The Church of the Least Fixed Point Lines: 40 Approved: compilers@ima.UUCP In article <252@hubcap.UUCP> steve@hubcap.clemson.edu (Dennis Stevenson) writes: >Someone suggested to me that the Trembley and Sorenson text is a good >replacement for Aho, Sethi and Ullman. Well, I'm on the other side - I've used Tremblay and Sorenson, but not the Dragon book. In fact, I took two senior half-classes (Formal Languages / Parsing and Compiler Writing (mostly code generation)) from J.P. Tremblay. T&S (The Theory and Practice of Compiler Writing, McGraw Hill, 1985) gives a good formal overview of different parsers (LR, SLR, LALR; LL(1)) and the algorithms used both in parser generators and in the parsers themselves. It has chapters on machine-independent and machine-dependent optimisation, though we didn't cover them so I can't really comment. It has plenty of examples. People who have taken formal languages as a theory class (push-down automata etc.) may want to skip some of the early chapters which review this stuff. It also has a chapter on compiler-compiler systems, covering Yacc and things like it (including ATS, an attributed LL(1) parser generator developed here); there is some coverage of automatic code-generator generators, which they hope to extend in a revision of the text some time in the next few years. Tou can also get "An Implementation Guide to Compiler Writing", a paperback which contains the complete (PL/1, unfortunately) implementation of an LL(1) table driven parser and code generator for a simple programming language. The authors have expressed the intent to re-write this using C, with ATS for the parser. Who knows when... All in all I liked the text; it's big, but then so is the Dragon book. Much of the detail is set up so it can be skipped in a course and used for reference later, so the size isn't really a problem. -- - irving - (reid@sask.uucp or {alberta, ihnp4, utcsri}!sask!reid) -- Send compilers articles to ima!compilers or, in a pinch, to Levine@YALE.ARPA Plausible paths are { ihnp4 | decvax | cbosgd | harvard | yale | cca}!ima Please send responses to the originator of the message -- I cannot forward mail accidentally sent back to compilers. Meta-mail to ima!compilers-request