Customer Reviews

Compiler Design and Construction (Electrical/computer science and engineering series)

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I've owned this book for quite some time and have always meant to write a review about it, but for one reason or another have always blown it off. The time has come, however to give full credit to good old Doc. Pyster. First off, this little book (a mere 357 pages including index,appendix,et al)concisely explains not only theoretical concerns but practical implementations as well. Pyster shows you,step by step, the implementation of a robustly featured Pascal compiler(called Rascal)using a LL(1) grammar. One of the beautiful features of this compiler description is the definition of an Expression that includes not only a leading minus sign but a plus/minus sign anywhere allowed by the conventions of Mathematics. I have a number of compiler development books(including the much cited Dragon book)and they all define expressions with optional leading minus signs (ex. -5 +3*2)but not expressions of the form(-5+-5*2). That second -5 is just not allowed for. Not so with Doc. Pyster. His CFG fully allows unary minus' anywhere that traditional mathematical analysis allows.

I don't know if any of you Amazonians have taken a Compiler development course or worked in the field, but you should recognize that it's exceedingly difficult to write a cfg specifying a computer language. Any help you can get from books is appreciated.pyster's fills that bill.

The first review of this book caused me to write this. I first read this book in 1979 when I needed to write a parser for my computer simulation to read in the data. I also have the "dragon" book (purchased much later), and other theoretical books. I took a graduate course in formal languages and automata a few years before I got this book. I had used parsers and parser generators written by others before I tried to write my own, so I had some experience and educational background. But this book got me over the practical bumps in the road that college courses and other books ignored. The issues of managing and reacting to errors, when and how to insert semantic processing functions, expression evaluation, etc., were all covered here. I still have this book and read it over from time to time. It helped me write my first LR(0) parser and has helped me in many practical ways since then.