Reddit reviews Engineering a Compiler
We found 4 Reddit comments about Engineering a Compiler. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
Reddit reviews Engineering a CompilerWe found 4 Reddit comments about Engineering a Compiler. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Introduction to Algorithms by CLRS
TAOCP is a waste of time and money; it's more for adorning your bookshelf than for actually reading. Pretty much anyone who suggests TAOCP and is less than 55 years old is just parroting Standard Wisdom™.
Godel, Escher, Bach is a nice book, but it's not as intellectually deep in today's world as it was when first published; a lot of the memes in GEB have been thoroughly absorbed into nerd culture at this point and the book should be enjoyed more as a work of art than expecting it to be particularly informative (IMO).
If you're interested in compilers, I recommend Engineering a Compiler by Cooper & Torczon. Same thing as TAOCP applies to people who suggest the Dragon Book. The Dragon Book is still good, but it focuses too much on parser generators and doesn't really cover enough of the other modern good stuff. (Yes, even the new edition.)
As far as real programming goes, K&R's The C Programming Language is still unmatched for its quality of exposition and brevity, but these days I'd strongly suggest picking up some Python or something before diving into C. And as a practical matter, I'd suggest learning some C++ from Koenig & Moo's Accelerated C++ before learning straight C.
Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is a good theory book, but I'd really suggest getting CLRS before Sipser. CLRS is way more interesting IMHO.
But he does not justify this claim, as far as I can see, and his other claim is just a particular case of internalism combined with infallibilism.
I think the take-home lesson from this post is that there's more to compilers than what is superficially apparent and that, as Cooper and Torczon say in the preface to their excellent book, "Compiler construction brings together techniques from disparate parts of computer science".
Read the source code to LLVM, Ocaml, Jikes RVM and SBCL.
Read papers on CiteSeer.
Definitions are not all created equal, and your about.com definition isn't so good. The definition I was taught in my compilers class is:
> What is a compiler?
>
> -A program that translates an executable program in one language into an executable program in another language
>
> -The compiler should improve the program, in some way
>
> What is an interpreter?
>
> -A program that reads an executable program and produces the results of executing that program
My prof was no slouch either; he's Cooper from Cooper and Torczon if you're familiar with compiler texts.
Edit: Markup...bleh. Is there a way to do multi-level lists with reddit's markup?