CS24210

Module Identifier	CS24210
Module Title	SYNTAX ANALYSIS AND TOPICS IN PROGRAMMING
Academic Year	2000/2001
Co-ordinator	Dr Mark Ratcliffe
Semester	Semester 1
Co-Requisite	CS21120
Mutually Exclusive	CS34210
Course delivery	Lecture	22 lectures
	Workshop	(Up to) 4 workshop sessions
	Practical	(Up to) 4 x 2 hr sessions
Assessment	Exam	2 Hours Written examination	100%
	Supplementary examination	Will take the same form, under the terms of the Department's policy.

General description
This module aims to familiarise students with the concepts required for specifying and implementing programming languages, and to study their practical applications in a variety of contexts.

Aims
This module aims to familiarise students with the concepts required for specifying and implementing programming languages.

Learning outcomes
On successful completion of this course students should be able to:

make effective use of compilers and other language processing software;

apply the techniques and algorithms used in compilation to other areas of software engineering;

understand the need for implementation independent semantics of programming languages.

Syllabus
1. Overview of Language Processing Software - 1 Lecture
Editors, compilers, static analysers, interpreters, text formatting, scripting languages.

2. Assemblers, Linkers and Loaders - 3 Lectures
Assembly languages and machine languages; Single pass and two pass assembly; Linking; Simple absolute loader; Linking loader

3. The structure of a typical compiler - 1 Lecture
Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis; Optimisation and code generation; Implementation; Symbol tables

4. Lexical Analysis - 3 Lectures, 2 Practicals
Lexemes and tokens; Regular Expressions; Finite Automata; Practical use of a scanner generator

5. Syntactic Analysis - 3 Lectures, 2 Practicals
Context free grammars; Parse trees and abstract syntax trees; Parsing strategies (recursive descent, LL, LR); Practical use of a parser generator

6. Intermediate Languages - 2 Lectures
Abstract syntax trees; Reverse polish notation; 3-address code; Attribute grammars and structural attributes

7. Semantic Analysis - 2 Lectures
Different kinds of semantic analysis; Attribute grammars and semantic attributes

8. Code generation - 3 Lectures
Aims of code generation; Memory management, instruction selection and register allocation; Flow graphs; A simple code generator

9. Optimisation and Optimising Compilers - 2 Lectures
Optimisation of source, intermediate and target code; Safety and profitability of optimisation; Flow graphs and optimisation of intermediate code

10. Applications of Compilation Techniques - 2 Lectures
Markup languages; scripting languages; VLSI

Reading Lists
Books
** Recommended Text
A.V. Aho, R. Sethi, and J.D. Ullman. (1986) Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools. Addison-Wesley
** Should Be Purchased
J. Bennett. (1996) Introduction to Compiling Techniques: a first course using ANSI C, lex and Yacc. McGraw-Hill