The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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On 2025-01-09 09:18, John R Levine wrote:

The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

I wish that they had proofread the pdf before posting. Various pieces
of yacc/lex code are missing.

OF.
[It's just a draft and the authors' actual contact addresses are on that
web page. How about writing to them and asking them to put in the
missing code? People update arXiv papers all the time. -John]

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On 2025-01-11 09:15, Our Moderator suggested:

[It's just a draft and the authors' actual contact addresses are on that
web page. How about writing to them and asking them to put in the
missing code? People update arXiv papers all the time. -John]

Thank you for the suggestion. As I double-checked the pages, I
discovered that it was my Lexmark at fault. So I converted from PDF 1.7
to PDF 1.3 and it printed in its entirety.

OF.
[That's strange. They try not to do anything clever when generating the PDFs. -John]

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John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

I am affraid that the best use of this paper is to forget it.
On one hand presentation is very naive and their "final"
compiler apparently does not handle things handled in ususal toy
compilers. On the other hand their presentation has a lot of
gaps and mistakes, so that a newbie is unlikely to be able to
follow them.
--
Waldek Hebisch

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[email protected] writes:

John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi >> using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

I am affraid that the best use of this paper is to forget it.
On one hand presentation is very naive and their "final"
compiler apparently does not handle things handled in ususal toy
compilers. On the other hand their presentation has a lot of
gaps and mistakes, so that a newbie is unlikely to be able to
follow them.

Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings but maintains the educational spirit of the paper? (It's
okay if the architecture is not a popular one.)
[Good question. There's the old Let's Build a Compiler which you can find
on my web site and some books. Alan Holub wrote a well known book but the
code in the book is incredibly buggy so I wouldn't recommend it. -John]

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Salvador Mirzo <[email protected]> wrote:

[email protected] writes:

John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi >>> using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

I am affraid that the best use of this paper is to forget it.
On one hand presentation is very naive and their "final"
compiler apparently does not handle things handled in ususal toy
compilers. On the other hand their presentation has a lot of
gaps and mistakes, so that a newbie is unlikely to be able to
follow them.

Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings but maintains the educational spirit of the paper? (It's
okay if the architecture is not a popular one.)
[Good question. There's the old Let's Build a Compiler which you can find
on my web site and some books. Alan Holub wrote a well known book but the code in the book is incredibly buggy so I wouldn't recommend it. -John]

I like very much old presentation of PL/0 in Wirth book "Algoritms
+ Data Structures = Programs". Unfortunately, it is available in
old edition of the book but missing in newer ones. Presentation is
in Pascal which seem to be unknown to current students. Wirth uses
hand coded LL parser (unlike texts depending on parser generators).
Code generator covers only imaginary stack machine which is
interpreted (one cound instead generate machine code, but Wirth does
not explain this). PL/0 compiler does not cover type-checking, but
there is PL/S which is similar, but shows more realistic language
including types.

Wirth "Compiler Construction" book available on the net contains
examples of Oberon-like compiler, about 20 pages. This is
written in Oberon, which may be a problem.

For compiler course that I gave in the past I developed my own
examples. One is variation on Wirth PL/0, but using flex and
bison for syntax and generating code for x86_64. If interested
see:

/zaj/public_html/kompi2015/pr

and look for links to subdirectories of 'pl0'. Version 1
is just lexical analyzer for 'flex', version 2 contains bison
grammar, version 3 builds a parse tree, version 4 builds
simplified parse tree, version 5 adds a code generator.

There are comments inside, but course was in Polish, so comments
and variable names are in Polish too.

Note: this is phase-by-phase approach. Enlarging language
may be tricky, unless one is subsetting compiler for bigger
language. And even when subsetting, there can be unexpected
dependence: code for expressions may need intermediate variables,
so general expressions and variables naturally appear together
in code generator.

I also made somewhat simpler example 'sk' (reachable from the
URL I gave above). This one trivializes syntax, using one letter
variable names and precedence based parser, but contains
"retargetable" code generator (one version generates normal C,
one i386 code, one multiprecision C).

In the past I fetched several compiler books from the net.
"Compiler Construction; A Practical Approach" by F.J.F. Benders
J.W. Haaring, T.H. Janssen, D. Meffert and A.C. van Oostenrijk
contains simple compiler for toy language called "Inger".

--
Waldek Hebisch

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On 2025-01-20 06:38, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings but maintains the educational spirit of the paper? (It's
okay if the architecture is not a popular one.)
[Good question. There's the old Let's Build a Compiler which you can find
on my web site and some books. Alan Holub wrote a well known book but the code in the book is incredibly buggy so I wouldn't recommend it. -John]

What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
notwithstanding)? There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
much substance.

(Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
to the output.)

OF.

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[email protected] wrote:
For compiler course that I gave in the past I developed my own

examples. One is variation on Wirth PL/0, but using flex and
bison for syntax and generating code for x86_64. If interested
see:

/zaj/public_html/kompi2015/pr

Oops, I should give a link instead of a filname:

http://fricas.org/~p-wyk4/kompi2015/pr

--
Waldek Hebisch

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On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:17:21 -0500, OrangeFish
<[email protected]d> wrote:

What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German >notwithstanding)? There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
much substance.

(Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
to the output.)

OF.

The English version is fairly simplistic - an undergrad intro course
at best. I haven't seen the German version.

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On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:38:42 -0300, Salvador Mirzo
<[email protected]> wrote:

[email protected] writes:

John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi >>> using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
compiler incremntally expanding the source language.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503

I am affraid that the best use of this paper is to forget it.
On one hand presentation is very naive and their "final"
compiler apparently does not handle things handled in ususal toy
compilers. On the other hand their presentation has a lot of
gaps and mistakes, so that a newbie is unlikely to be able to
follow them.

Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these >short-comings but maintains the educational spirit of the paper? (It's
okay if the architecture is not a popular one.)
[Good question. There's the old Let's Build a Compiler which you can find
on my web site and some books. Alan Holub wrote a well known book but the >code in the book is incredibly buggy so I wouldn't recommend it. -John]

The Racket lanaguage (which is a Scheme variant) has a framework
called nanopass designed deliberately for teaching compilers. https://docs.racket-lang.org/nanopass/index.html


I don't have URLs for papers (sorry!), but over the years, some groups
have written about using nanopass in compiler courses.

If Scheme(-like) is not to your liking, the ideas of nanopass have
been adopted and implemented in some other languages. Search engines
are your friend.

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On 2025-01-21 19:44, George Neuner wrote:

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:17:21 -0500, OrangeFish
<[email protected]d> wrote:

What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
notwithstanding)? There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
much substance.

(Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
to the output.)

OF.

The English version is fairly simplistic - an undergrad intro course
at best. I haven't seen the German version.

I was suggesting Wirth to answer Salvador Misro's request for "Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings
but maintains the educational spirit of the paper?".

Is Wirth (in any version) suitable?

OF.

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On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 20:49:51 -0500, OrangeFish
<[email protected]d> wrote:

I was suggesting Wirth to answer Salvador Misro's request for "Would you >recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings
but maintains the educational spirit of the paper?".

Is Wirth (in any version) suitable?

Wirth's books are fine for dipping your toes in the ocean of language implementation. They are pretty well written and they cover the
entire compiler from parsing to code generation.

However, they are undergrad level at best - I have yet to see Wirth demonstrates any significant optimizations [middle or back end], or
any attempt at implementing a functional language. SFAIHS, everything
he has written has been about either procedural or OO implementation.

[My impression is that the largest difference between old compiler books
and the state of the art is that optimization and the analysis that enables
it has gotten vastly more sophisticated. Back when the Dragon Book was first written, compilers often had to fit in 64K and if you wanted to keep the intermediate code in memory, you couldn't compile very big programs. -John]

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