Compilers Practium Notes

Lectures

Date	Topic (and notes, when available)	Homework	Reading For This Class
Wed Jan 18 	Course Overview	Start PA1
Mon Jan 23	History of PL Functional Programming		Required: Chapters 10.1 - 10.3, 10.5 - 10.8, 13.2.4 Optional: Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools
Wed Jan 25	Functional Programming Overview of Cool	PA1c (Rosetta Checkpoint) Due	Required: The Cool Reference Manual J. W. Backus. Speedcoding. Journal of the ACM 1(1) pp. 4-6, 1954.
Mon Jan 30	Lexical Analysis & Finite Automata (Part 1)		Required: Chapters 2.1 - 2.2 Optional: Edsger Dijkstra. How do we tell truths that might hurt? EWD498, 1975. P. J. Landin. The next 700 programming languages. Communications of the ACM 9(3) pp. 157-166, 1966.
Wed Feb 01	More Finite Automata (Part 2)	PA1 (Rosetta) Due
Mon Feb 06	Context-Free Grammars, Parsing, Derivations, Ambiguity		Required: Chapters 2.4 - 2.4.1 CD Chapters 2.4 - 2.4.1
Wed Feb 08	Top-Down Parsing	WA1 Due PA2 (Lexing) Due	Required: Chapters 2.3 - 2.3.2 Optional: Wikipedia's LL Parsing Mike Clark's Removing Left Recursion Robert Ball's First Sets, Follow Sets and LL(1) Tables
Mon Feb 13	LR Parsing	(Start PA3 early; look at the Midterm schedule to see why.)	Required: Chapter 2.3.3 Optional: Wikipedia's LR Parsing
Wed Feb 15	LR Table Construction	WA2 Due	Required: Chapters 2.3.4 CD Chapters 2.4.2 - 2.4.3
Mon Feb 20	Midterm 1 (in class) (1 hour 30 minutes if needed)	(Do not forget PA3.)
Wed Feb 22	Code Generation (Part 1)	WA3 Due PA3 (Parsing) Due	Required: The Cool Reference Manual (no, really) Required for Compilers Only: Chapter 14.1 CD Chapters 5 - 5.3.2
Mon Feb 27	Code Generation (Part 2)		Required for Compilers Only: USC CS 410 Lecture Notes: "Code Generation for a Stack Machine" CD Chapter 5.4
Wed Feb 29	Scoping & Types	Compilers: PA6c (Compiler Checkpoint) Due	Required: Chapters 3.1 - 3.6 Optional: Wikipedia's Scope (programming)
Mon Mar 12	Type Checking & Static Semantics Guest Lecture: Claire Le Goues		Required: Chapters 4 - 4.1, 7 - 7.1 Optional: Luca Cardelli's Type Systems (recommended)
Wed Mar 14	More Static Semantics		Required: Chapters 7.2 - 7.3 Optional: Wikipedia's Type system
Mon Mar 19	Cool Type Checking, Runtime Organization	PA4c (Semantics Checkpoint) Due	Required: Chapters 8.1 - 8.3 Required for Compilers Only: CD Chapter 8.2.2 Optional: Chapter 6 of Grant, Palmer & Smith's Princples of Programming Languages
Wed Mar 21	Operational Semantics	WA4 Due	Required: Chapters 9 - 9.4 Chapters 2 - 2.2.3 and 2.3.3 of Grant, Palmer & Smith's Princples of Programming Languages Required for Compilers Only: Wikipedia's Virtual method table Optional: Bjarne Stroustrup. What is "Object-Oriented Programming"?. 1991 Wikipedia's Object-oriented programming
Mon Mar 26	Basic Blocks, Local Optimizations	PA4 (Semantics) Due (free 48 hour extension)	Required: Wikipedia's Basic block
Wed Mar 28	Dataflow Analysis, Global Optimizations		Required: Wikipedia's Data-flow analysis CD Chapter 16 - 16.4 Required for Compilers Only: CD Chapter 5.5 - 5.6 CD Chapter 16.5 - 16.9
Mon Apr 02	Automatic Memory Management	WA5 Due	Required: Chapter 7.7 Optional: David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, V. T. Rajan. A unified theory of garbage collection. In Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications, pp. 50-68, 2004.
Wed Apr 04	Exceptions and Error Handling		Required: Chapter 8.5
Mon Apr 09	Debuggers and Profilers	WA6 Due	Required: Chapters 15.3.2 and 15.3.3 Susan L. Graham, Peter B. Kessler, Marshall K. McKusick. gprof: a call graph execution profiler. In Best of Programming Languages Design and Implementation 1979-1999, pp. 49-57, 2004.
Wed Apr 11	Linking, Loading and Shared Libraries	Compilers: PA6 (Compiler) Due	Required: Chapters 14.4 and 14.6 CD Chapter 3.8 CD Chapter 14.7 Optional: Software Usability II by Tom Davis (a description of how software engineering (and shared libaries, called "DSO"s) played out as Silicon Graphics was developing the IRIX Operating System for the SGI Indy workstation)
Mon Apr 16	Language Security	WA7 Due PA5c (Interpreter Checkpoint) Due	Required: Aleph One. Smashing The Stack For fun And Profit. In Phrack 7(49):14, 1996.
Wed Apr 18	Midterm 2 (in class) (1 hour 30 minutes if needed)
Mon Apr 23	Internet Security		Required: Ken Thompson. Reflections on Trusting Trust. ACM Turing Award Speech.
Wed Apr 25	Introduction to Game Theory		Optional: Wikipedia's Game Theory
Mon Apr 30	Quantum Computing, and/or Romance Novels
Mon May 07		PA5 (Interpreter) Due Compilers: PA7 (Optimizer) Due Take-Home Programming Languages Final Exam Due Compilers: Take-Home Compilers Final Exam Due