State of books on compilers The book collects and condenses the experience of years of teaching compiler courses and doing research on formal language theory, on compiler and l- guage design, and to a lesser extent on natural language processing. In the turmoil of information technology developments, the subject of the book has kept the same fundamental principles over half a century, and its relevance for theory and practice is as important as in the early days. This state of a?airs of a topic, which is central to computer science and is based on consolidated principles, might lead us to believe that the acc- panying textbooks are by now consolidated, much as the classical books on mathematics. In fact this is rather not true: there exist ?ne books on the mathematical aspects of language and automata theory, but the best books on translators are sort of encyclopaedias of algorithms, design methods, and practical know-how used in compiler design. Indeed a compiler is a mic- cosm,featuring avarietyofaspectsrangingfromalgorithmicwisdomto CPU andmemoryexploitation.Asaconsequencethetextbookshavegrowninsize, and compete with respect to their coverage of the last developments on p- gramming languages, processor architectures and clever mappings from the former to the latter.
From the reviews:
"One fundamental problem that every compiler should address: namely, translating one formal language to another. This book addresses this fundamental problem in breadth and depth. ... The book is intended as a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It succeeds quite well in its goal of addressing the fundamental theory behind the syntax-directed aspect of compilers; hence, it is most suitable for students in a theoretical computer science (CS) program ... ." (MohammadReza Mousavi, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2009)
"This textbook covers the fundamental concepts of formal languages and compilation. It presents a comprehensive selection of topics and is based on rigorous definitions and algorithms, illustrated by many motivating examples, with a focus on the importance of combining theoretical concepts with practical applications." (Jörg Desel, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1190, 2010)
"One fundamental problem that every compiler should address: namely, translating one formal language to another. This book addresses this fundamental problem in breadth and depth. ... The book is intended as a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It succeeds quite well in its goal of addressing the fundamental theory behind the syntax-directed aspect of compilers; hence, it is most suitable for students in a theoretical computer science (CS) program ... ." (MohammadReza Mousavi, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2009)
"This textbook covers the fundamental concepts of formal languages and compilation. It presents a comprehensive selection of topics and is based on rigorous definitions and algorithms, illustrated by many motivating examples, with a focus on the importance of combining theoretical concepts with practical applications." (Jörg Desel, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1190, 2010)