At the end of the course you can build a compiler for a small programming language in a well structured manner, and you know and can use the required algorithms and tools. You can create a grammar for a programming language, build a parser for it, perform static analysis, create an abstract syntax tree, and generate code.

It is important to know how compilers work because many applications actually act as a compiler: they translate input written in some language to output in some other. So, compiler construction is a basic disciple for any computer scientist.

The construction of a compiler is a natural meeting place of many computer science disciplines. You work with finite automata, grammars, parsers, tree structures and graphs, recursive algorithms, typing systems, code generation algorithms, to name a few.

In this course you will stepwise construct, in your own favourite language, a basic compiler for a small but representative language, SPL (Simple Programming Language). The main steps are 1) the construction of a parser for SPL which generates an abstract syntax tree; 2) the implementation of a type checker / type inferencing system for SPL; 3) a code generation for a simple stack machine.

Finally, one can choose an extension of the basic compiler thus constructed. One can choose to extend SPL with new features, or to generate code for real machine architectures.