Compiler Construction

Compiler construction is a widely used software engineering exercise, but because most students will not be compiler writers, care must be taken to make it relevant in a core curriculum. The course is suitable for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Auxiliary tools, such as generators and interpreters, often hinder the learning: students have to fight tool idiosyncrasies, mysterious errors, and other poorly educative issues. We introduce a set of tools especially designed or improved for compiler construction educative projects in C.We also provide suggestions about new approaches to compiler Construction. We draw guidelines from our experience to make tools suitable for education purposes. The final result of this paper is to provide a general knowledge about compiler design and implementation and to serve as a springboard to more advanced courses. Although this paper concentrates on the implementation of a compiler, an outline for an advanced topics course that builds upon the compiler is also presented by us.