East Carolina University
Department of Computer Science

CSCI 5220
Program Translation
Standard Syllabus

Catalog entry

P: CSCI 4627 or consent of instructor. Formal language specification for programming languages. Advanced parsing techniques. Code generation and optimization.

Course summary

Course topics

• Overview of compiler structure
• Regular expressions.
• Lexical analysis. Tokens and lexemes. Creating a lexical analyzer using Flex.
• Context-free grammars. Derivations and parse trees.
• Parsing, including top-down parsing by recursive descent and LR parsing using Bison.
• Attributes and attribute grammars. Syntax-directed translation.
• Intermediate code and intermediate-code generation using syntax-directed translation.
• Code optimization techniques as applied to intermediate code.

Student learning outcomes

• Describe a set of strings using a regular expression
• Construct a lexical analyzer using Flex
• Distinguish between a token and a lexeme
• Write a context-free grammar for a small language
• Do derivations and create parse trees for a given sequence of tokens and a given context-free grammar.
• Write a recursive-descent parser for a small grammar, with elementary semantic processing
• Determine FIRST and FOLLOW sets for a given grammar
• Recognize and analyze an LL(1) grammar
• Simulate a shift-reduce parser
• Construct an SLR(1) finite-state machine for a given grammar
• Use Bison to create a parser for a given grammar that create abstract syntax trees
• Add semantic actions to a grammar to produce intermediate code
• Explain the purpose of control-flow analysis
• Explain the purpose of data-flow analysis
• Write an interpreter that simplifies abstract syntax trees

Textbook

Grading

Grading will be based on midterm exams, a final exam and a major programming project. The midterm exams count a total of 36%, the final exam 25% and the programming projects 39%.

Grade meanings