Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf]

Hmmm... I'm not as sure. I wonder if we could do people a service by showing them how it's done today from the start, rather than showing them yesterday's stuffy, ponderous, inelegant approach (sorry for the opinion) and then having to roll that back when they start working on something in practice.

hasbot7• 6 years ago

It really wasn't how compilers were constructed in '96 either. I was very into compilers in the late 80's and even then we didn't handwrite lexers or parsers. I was using bison and flex around '89.

onceUponADime• 6 years ago

Still usefull little tools to parse in configuration dsls etc.

patrec2• 6 years ago

Basically no serious programming language uses bison or flex, and everything that does (awk is YACC based) has terrible error messages. People totally do handwrite lexers and parsers, if you use some language in earnest the chances it has a handwritten parser or lexer or both are far greater than that it has been developed with bison/flex.

seanmcdirmid4• 6 years ago

Many mass-distributed compilers have hand-crafted lexers and parsers since (a) they aren’t hard to write and (b) hand crafting gives you complete control over error recovery.

vector_spaces2• 6 years ago

How do we usually construct compilers in industry today? I saw others mentioning parser generators -- is that the main difference?

chrisseaton13• 6 years ago

This whole thread has been about parser generators, but that's not really what I meant!

I think the biggest difference is the rich intermediate representations we use these days. These classic texts don't really address intermediate representations and are usually syntax-directed instead.

These days a program will spent almost all of its time deconstructed into an IR.

slavapestov• 6 years ago

I think the main difference is that in today’s compilers the parser is such a small part that whether you use a parser generator or roll your own recursive descent parser is mostly just a footnote.

ainar-g• 6 years ago

Wirthian languages, and especially Oberon-07, are definitely a topic I want to familiarise myself with, but there is so little information about it on the Web, and even fewer codebases to learn from. And a lot of the compilers and tooling seems to be weirdly Windows-oriented. The questions I still have very little answers to are:

* How is error handling done in Oberon-07?

* How does one do generic programming in Oberon-07?

* What is Oberon-07's async story?

I will be thankful for any pointers (heh).

pjmlp3• 6 years ago

Error handling is done the old style, you just test for error conditions and such.

Generic programming and async are supported on the Active Oberon programming language in the Oberon family branch. Which also does support exception handling.

Most recent version from Active Oberon

http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/news/2

The A2 OS written in Active Oberon and respective documentation

https://github.com/btreut/a2

Some A2 overview

http://sage.com.ua/en.shtml?e1l0

While Modula-2 had co-routines and exceptions, Wirth has chosen a minimalist path with Oberon.

Oberon-07 design goal has been to remove as many features as possible from original Oberon, while keeping a GC enabled systems programming language.

Then you have the other path, taken by others at ETHZ, which extended Oberon into a more expressive language, namely Oberon-2, Component Pascal and Active Oberon.

With Active Oberon being what is actually still used at ETHZ for teaching some OS classes and OS research subject.

Rochus• 6 years ago

Here (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon) is a Qt/C++ based viewer/cross-referencer for Oberon-07 code bases as well as an Oberon to C++/Lua/LuaJIT bytecode transpiler/compiler; an IDE is work in progress.

How is error handling done in Oberon-07?

There is an Oberon programming language with compiler written in Oberon, and there is an operating system called Oberon as well; you can have a look at the source code, but there are also a couple of free books about it, see http://www.projectoberon.com/

How does one do generic programming in Oberon-07?

No support for generics yet; there was a proposal in the nineties, but Wirth didn't integrate it. Neither the Go language which is a brain child of Oberon-2 has generics (yet).

What is Oberon-07's async story

Oberon is single threaded; there is a coroutine library part of the Oakwood standard. But nothing comparable e.g. to Go.

lboasso• 6 years ago

And a lot of the compilers and tooling seems to be weirdly Windows-oriented

When I read this book I had an hard time running and compiling the source code included. If you want to read the book and try out the example compiler (oberon0), you can follow the instructions here: https://github.com/lboasso/oberon0. You just need a JVM >= 8 and the oberonc compiler: https://github.com/lboasso/oberonc

sbmthakur• 6 years ago

Just discovered Wirth's book The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity. I would like to know if it's worth the time investment?

Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf]

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