If you really want the full understanding of compilers, you should write a simple compiler. 1. Design your own programming language, or equally, pick a languag

If you really want the full understanding of compilers, you should write a simple compiler. 1. Design your own programming language, or equally, pick a language and remove virtually every feature. In fact, there's no rule that this input language needs to be Turing complete. For simplicity, you should limit yourself to one datatype, integers, and one library call, print. Now, write a set of valid and invalid programs. Write a program to convert this text into tokens. As said, this can be regular expressions or some hand-coded loops. 2. Look at the language you've defined and sketch it out in a few simple (and recursive) rules. Think in terms of statements, expressions, and tokens (symbols or identifiers). The best experience is to write a recursive descent parser or use YACC, but in some way you should convert the stream of tokens into a tree structure. 3. The next steps can be complicated but it's important to keep your footing. You should have a destination architecture in mind. It should not be x86. Pick something simple like an 8-bit microprocessor (Z80) or something 16-bit like MIPS. Make sure you have a simulator or device to target. You will need to learn some assembly and have the skills to convert programs to assembly language by hand. 4. Now, in as many stages or passes as you like, convert the program into machine instructions. You can go over statements and split them into shorter ones with a fixed number of arguments. You can separate function calls as their own assignment. You can force each statement to have a new assignment with temporary variables. These are the backend steps where you operate on a structure to create new structures to make life easier. Think in terms of generating code for each function, techniques for storing results in registers to use, saving values on the stack between calls, and outputting the code in one giant assembly file. Then test, test, test. That's it. Once you've got it working, congratulations, you're a compiler writer. One benefit of taking this class in school is the textbook, lectures, tests, test cases, and partners to work with, but it's totally possible to achieve on your own if you are motivated enough.