COURSE TITLE: EECS 322 Compilers

PREREQUISITE:  EECS 395/495 Programming Languages (DURING 2009-2010 THIS COURSE IS OFFERED IN WINTER QTR ONLY). Exceptions for grad students with suitable background are possible; contact Robby.

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: The compiler is the programmer's primary tool. Understanding the compiler is therefore critical for programmers, even if
they never build one. Furthermore, many design techniques that emerged in the context of compilers are useful for a range of other application areas.

This course introduces students to the essential elements of building a compiler: parsing, context-sensitive property checking, code linearization, register allocation, etc.

To take this course, students are expected to already understand how programming languages behave, to a fairly detailed degree. The material in the course builds on that knowledge via a series of semantics preserving transformations that start with a fairly high-level programming language and culminate in machine code.

COURSE COORDINATOR: Robby Findler

REQUIRED TEXT: 

GRADES:  Grades will primarily be based on codewalks at the end of the
quarter, but also based on intermediate projects. This course is
programming project heavy.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: Students that complete this course should:

 - understand how to efficiently implement a programming language,

 - have an accurate performance model for the primitives in a
  programming language,

 - have a good sense for the kind of assembly code that a compiler
  produces

 - be able to maintain and extend a compiler for a programming
  language