Compiler Design....

Before I dive into the meat of the topic, I would like to mention that I am a HUGE fan of Per Brinch Hansen... so whatever viewpoints I express in this post, will totally be partial to him.Per Brinch Hansen is teaching me Compiler Design this year and I need to implement 6 phases of a compiler, for a minimalistic language(PL), incrementally for the course completion. I am already done with the scanner and parser.Programming should be a thoughtless process. It should be as obvious as Maths.

Most of you guys(that is, if you are in Computer Science) would have taken design courses(OO etc ). How many times did you have trouble implementing a properly designed code? If your design is good, you should have none, but the idiosyncrasies of the programming language sometime do corner you at some nasty implementation issue. Everyone has seen a nasty memory leak or a typo ruining the whole logic of your implementation. According to Prof Hansen:

Programming should be a thoughtless process. It should be as obvious as Maths. If you are asked the value of 5+2, you would say 7. Have you ever stopped and tried to derive that. Programming should be like that.

Yesterday I was writing the parser, which mainly involved sifting through the PL code and producing a JAVA implementation for the PL's BNF. PL's grammar had some 50 rules which needed to be implemented in the form of around 50 functions. Following the design rules and restrictions imposed by him, I was able to code the parser in just four straight hours!! The code compiled with no syntax errors!! I spent around a day testing it rigorously..and nothing failed!! In fact at one point of time, programming seemed more like documentation. I even wrote vi macros to construct the function skeleton from the grammar rule in the comment (I hate typing:P ). Cant wait to finish rest of phases...

PS: BTW the EFS project ,I was talking about in the earlier post, is implemented and all the issues are resolved. Too bad its proprietary :(

PPS: A colleague forwarded me this link. Turn out that Per Brinch Hansen was the one who came up with the idea of an OS kernel!!