Computing
Compilers and Computer Architecture
Module code: G5035
Level 5
15 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Class, Lecture
Assessment modes: Coursework, Computer based exam
Topics on this module include:
- low-level versus high-level languages
- an introduction to language implementation techniques, compilers and interpreters, grammars and parsing
- hardware implications, instruction set design and implementation
- lexical analysis
- the relevance of finitestate automata and regular grammars
- implementation techniques
- problems for particular languages, syntax analysis overview of grammars and parsing techniques
- top-down and bottom-up parsing
- predictive parsing, shift-reduce parsing
- implementing hand-coded top-down predictive parsers
- semantic analysis and code generation from trees and from flat intermediate codes
- symbol tables
- type checking
- handling of specific high-level language constructs
- runtime storage allocation and scoping
- instruction set consequences
- hardware aspects of performance enhancement caches, pipelining and parallelism
- recent developments in processor design
- code optimisation
- introduction to flow analysis.
Pre-requisite
Further Programming or ability to program in Java.
Module learning outcomes
- Explain the structure of a conventional compiler, showing the interfaces between the phases.
- Use formal syntactic specifications for common high-level language constructs in the construction of the analysis phase of a compiler.
- Implement modules of a complete compiler for a simple source language and a simple target architecture.
- Explain the key characteristics of the instruction set of a simple modern processor and illustrate how it can be used in compiler-generated code.