CSE 504: Advanced Compiler Design

[Announcements][Projects]

TA: Jonghaw Lee (jlee@cs.sunysb.edu)
Office hours: TueThu 4-5pm, CS Building room 2110

TA: Xiaohan Zhang (xhzhang@cs.sunysb.edu)
Office hours: Tue 2:30-4:30pm, CS Building room 1207

Contents

• Objectives
• Prerequisites
• Overview
• Reading
• Software
• Communication
• Grading
• Your Rights and Responsibilities
• Tentative schedule

Objectives

Prerequisites

Being a project intensive course, a good working experience with Java programming and the UNIX environment (not just familiarity) is essential. You will also need to know how to set up "make"  files and use symbolic debuggers. At the very least, you should be able to pick these up within the first couple of weeks.

Familiarity with concepts from object oriented languages (classes, inheritance etc.) will be useful but not necessary: I will briefly cover the fundamental concepts we will need for the projects.

Overview

•  Lexical analysis (analogous to recognizing words in a sentence),
•  Parsing (analogous to grouping words into phrases, sentences, paragraphs etc.)
•  Semantic Analysis (e.g., type checking), and
•  Code generation

The compiler will be written in Java.  Advanced topics such as program optimization, machine code generation and storage management will be discussed in the lectures.

Reading

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman, Addison-Wesley, 1988, 796pp. ISBN 0-201-10088-6.

• Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, by Andrew Appel.
• The Java Programming Language Second Edition by Ken Arnold and James Gosling.

Software

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Communication

Grading

• Projects: 40%
• Midterm exam: 30%
• Final exam: 30%.

You are advised to start working on the projects at the earliest possible time even if the deadlines are far away. The date the projects are due will be clearly specified in the project handout, on the web; any changes in deadlines will be posted on the course homepages.

Projects are due by 11:59pm on the specified date. Late projects will be penalized at the rate of 20% per day. So, there is no point submitting a project more than 4 days late! Each team can submit one project late by seven calendar days (1 week) without late penalty. You don't need to send me mail about this. No extensions will be allowed beyond this.

Your Rights and Responsibilities

Special Needs

If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, you are urged to contact the staff in the Disabled

Student Services office (DSS), Room 133 Humanities, 632-6748/TDD. DSS will review your concerns and determine, with you, what accommodations are necessary and appropriate.

All information and documentation of disability is confidential.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Because a primary goal of the course is to teach professionalism, any academic dishonesty will be viewed as evidence that this goal has not been achieved. Any act of cheating will be treated with utmost seriousness.

You can discuss the course material with other students, but not the homework assignments themselves. In effect, you can discuss the problems but not the solutions. If you help another student with a homework, use examples that do not resemble those in the homework. Remember that there are many different ways to solve the same problem; even solutions with the same central idea can be formulated in many different ways. Therefore, suspiciously similar homework solutions will be considered as evidence of disallowed collaboration or copying.

In case you have any questions about whether an act of collaboration may constitute "cheating", please come and talk to the instructor beforehand to clarify the issue.

Copying an assignment from another student in this class or obtaining a solution from some other source will lead to an automatic F for this course and to a disciplinary action. Allowing another student to copy one's work will be treated as an act of academic dishonesty, leading to the same penalty as copying. You should learn how to protect your data. Failure to do so is also unprofessional and it may expose you to the danger that someone will copy your homework and will submit it as his or her own (see above). In this case, you may be given a score of 0 for the assignment in question (and the other party will get an F).

 All cases of academic dishonesty will be reviewed by the Engineeing College's committee (CASA).

Survival Tips

Do not postpone working on assignments. Start working on programming assignments as soon as they are handed out. Do not wait till the day before the deadline. You will see that assignments take much more time when you work on them under pressure, than when you are more relaxed. Remember that no late submissions are allowed.

Do not postpone working on assignments! This cannot be understated. Despite the above warning, most students will end up working only around the deadline. Remember, the homeworks usually take more time that it initially appears. Furthermore, I expect both the TA and me to be swamped on the office hours before projects are due. So, you, being wiser than the rest, should start earlier and beat the rush!

Design before you code. Writing a well designed piece of code is always easier than staring with some code that "almost works" and adding patches to make it "really work".

Follow good programming discipline. Why spend hours debugging when you can party? A little bit of thought before you do some esoteric pointer manipulation will save you a lot of time, headache and may be a grade!

Tentative Schedule