Pikuma – Compilers, Interpreters & Formal Languages 2024-11

Published on: 2024-11-10 23:33:54

Categories: 28

Descriptions

Compilers, Interpreters & Formal Languages, This course is designed to be a beginner-friendly introduction to compilers. As we evolve, we will incrementally put together an interpreter for a very simple scripting language. Compilers always had a reputation for being a difficult topic, and their historical association with dragons (starting with the Dragon Book) never really help the cause. We’ll try to approach every explanations with beginners in mind. You can think of it as a “first course” on compilers for developers that never wrote an interpreter before. We’ll build together, from the ground up, a compiler for a simple programming language called Pinky. Think of a toy scripting language with a syntax inspired by Lua and ALGOL W. Our main host language will be Python. Python allows us to focus our attention on compiler-specific concepts while being extremely productive. Still, I’ll try to include some helpful tips on how to implement the ideas we just learned using the C programming language.

What you’ll learn

Lexical analysis
Syntax analysis
Parsing algorithms
Intermediate representation (AST)
Formal languages & grammars
BNF notation & syntax diagrams
Identifying and reporting errors
Code generation
Writing our own VM
Emitting bytecode
Type checking

Who this course is for

If you never wrote an interpreter before, or even if you did but still feel you have some blind spots in your understanding of how it all works, then this course is definitely for you!