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I agree wholeheartedly with this. I go to Stanford and took the compilers course this past spring. Honestly, I almost dropped the class after the first 2 assign

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I go to Stanford and took the compilers course this past spring. Honestly, I almost dropped the class after the first 2 assignments because having to learn Bison and Flex to implement a lexer and parser taught me very little about what was actually happening under the hood and I spent most of my time figuring out the syntax. Static analysis and code gen were really cool though and I feel like those assignments taught me a lot more about what modern compilers are actually doing and how they can help optimize my code.

rrradical 12y ago
Just another data point, but I really enjoyed my course, even starting with the lexing/parsing. We did do everything from scratch though. I imagine learning to use bison/flex in a class isn't very rewarding.
pekk 12y ago
Was it that you wanted to write your own custom recursive-descent parser, or you just wanted to use ANTLR or something? To me it makes sense that a compilers course would de-emphasize parsing.