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A comment on If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it backwards.

Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by agumonkey on Thursday August 07, 2014 @10:30AM (#8147869)
People at Brown University simply cut the syntactic part away from compilation. They use s-exp and start working on semantics and compilation. IMO it is the best way. Syntax is an immense waste of time. The fun is in formal transformations, IR, tiles, register allocation and such.
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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by kenjackson on Thursday August 07, 2014 @11:44AM (#8148294)
The back end may be the fun part, but there is a lot of actual computer science in the front end too.
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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by agumonkey on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:12PM (#8148482)
Agree, grammars can be fun, but IMO syntax is the source of many wasted efforts and endless debates. Just use s-exps. Easy to parse, easy to manipulate, maybe not the easiest to read statically, but you can ask your ide/editor to query/transform it to check or gather data.
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