Lecture 1 - 480/580 (compiler construction)

Introductory Information (who I am, textbook, dates and times)

Computer Science and Western Civilization talk; where translators fit in.

	bridge gap between people and machines.
	Spair - Whorf hypothesis, Turing tarpit arguments

Why everybody should study compiler construction, even if they never build
a compiler afterwards.
	ties lots of things you have learned about previously together:
		theory (finite automata, CFL)
		data structures
		modularization
		utilization of software tools

Introduction to what a translator is
	the translators involved in the conventional (batch style)
	programming steps
preprocessor - compiler - assembler - link/loader - machine code
                 |
	    parser - code generation

In this class we will study only one type of translator, compilers for
conventional ALGOL-like languages (Pascal, ADA, etc etc).  As those of you
who have taken 381 know, there are many other types of langauges.
Translators for these are radically different from translators for ALGOL
languages.  There are also many other types of translators.

	other types of translators
		text formatters
		silicon compilers
		interfaces (database interface, operating system)
		visual programming languages?

Steps in any translator
	1. Recognize when input is available
	2. Break input into individual components	(lexical analysis)
	3. merge individual pieces into meaningful structures (parsing)
	4. process structures				(semantic analysis)
	5. produce output				(code generation)