Is it a standard textbook in computer science
courses among US universities?
Comments? ;)
On 20/07/2026 16:50, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
Is it a standard textbook in computer science
courses among US universities?
Comments? ;)
Please do not post advert links, or links to possibly copyright
violating content. Everyone here is perfectly capable of using a web >search. If a book is still in print, it is unlikely that you can
legally download a copy for free. There are exceptions, and a link to
an author's or publisher's website where they make this clear and
provide a valid source of the book is not unreasonable.
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C. It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C. It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
On 2026-07-20 18:06, Dan Cross wrote:
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C.ÿ It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Is this, quasi en passant, meant as a critique of the books of the
authors of the "Dragon Book" as well?
I'm asking because the authors (specifically Aho, Hopcroft, Sethi,
Ullman) and their books had been authoritative during the 70's/80's
in that area.
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C. It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
On 20/07/2026 17:46, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
On 2026-07-20 18:06, Dan Cross wrote:
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C.ÿ It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Is this, quasi en passant, meant as a critique of the books of the
authors of the "Dragon Book" as well?
I'm asking because the authors (specifically Aho, Hopcroft, Sethi,
Ullman) and their books had been authoritative during the 70's/80's
in that area.
I wouldn't recommend the Dragon Book to anyone unless they are
particularly interesting in the theory behind lexing and parsing. 1000
pages and 500 pages of that seem to be spent on what is usually
considered the simplest part of a compiler.
There are newer and more practical works around.
I wouldn't recommend the Dragon Book to anyone unless they are
particularly interesting in the theory behind lexing and parsing.
1000 pages and 500 pages of that seem to be spent on what is usually considered the simplest part of a compiler.
On 2026-07-20 18:06, Dan Cross wrote:
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C. It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Is this, quasi en passant, meant as a critique of the books of the
authors of the "Dragon Book" as well?
I'm asking because the authors (specifically Aho, Hopcroft, Sethi,
Ullman) and their books had been authoritative during the 70's/80's
in that area.
In article <113ljdq$qnef$1@dont-email.me>,
Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
On 2026-07-20 18:06, Dan Cross wrote:
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C. It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Is this, quasi en passant, meant as a critique of the books of the
authors of the "Dragon Book" as well?
No, it's specifically about Holub's treatment.
The Dragon book
is much better, in my opinion, though showing its age.
I'm asking because the authors (specifically Aho, Hopcroft, Sethi,
Ullman) and their books had been authoritative during the 70's/80's
in that area.
For parsing and so on, I would argue they still mostly are. If
you want to understand how regular expressions actually work,
and you've outgrown things like Russ Cox's pages, you can do a
lot worse than to read the dragon book.
However, my friends who work on compilers tell me that the main
areas of interest have moved on, and the Dragon book does not
give a lot of treatment to code generation, modern optimization
techniques, abstractions that allow parts of a compiler to be
reused (e.g., in tooling) and so on.
I'm not sure there is a great book for these; John Levine would
know much better than I, but some friends who work on compilers
say that "Engineering a Compiler" by Cooper and Torczon is
better in those areas. I still have a soft spot for Appel's,
"Modern Compiler Implementation in ML"; itself a bit dated now,
I'm afraid, but in some senses a better treatment since the
implementation language allows a higher level of abstraction, so
less minutia to track while trying to concentrate on the
material.
- Dan C.
(Disclaimer: I took compilers from Aho; one of the few Computer
Science courses I took. And )
[snip][snip]
(Disclaimer: I took compilers from Aho; one of the few Computer
Science courses I took. And )
[*] Back then they told us that there was a group of authors who
just copied parts of every book to publish new ones. (Not that
this would be bad per se.) But I think it was these authors.
I wouldn't be surprised if they extended on their earlier work
to create the Dragon book (but I'm just speculating).
Does it make sense to write your own
C compiler? For what purposes?
On 7/21/2026 2:30 AM, bart wrote:
On 20/07/2026 17:46, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
On 2026-07-20 18:06, Dan Cross wrote:
Holub publishes that book on his web site, but he's an idiot,
and I would not use that as any of a reference for writing a
compiler, a reference for a C, or a reference for writing a C
compiler in C.ÿ It's mostly regurgitation of the Dragon book
with C syntax.
Is this, quasi en passant, meant as a critique of the books of the
authors of the "Dragon Book" as well?
I'm asking because the authors (specifically Aho, Hopcroft, Sethi,
Ullman) and their books had been authoritative during the 70's/80's
in that area.
I wouldn't recommend the Dragon Book to anyone unless they are
particularly interesting in the theory behind lexing and parsing. 1000
pages and 500 pages of that seem to be spent on what is usually
considered the simplest part of a compiler.
There are newer and more practical works around.
Dunno about modern MacOS land, apparently there people use Apple's tools
and (unlike pretty much everyone else at this point) they charge >subscription fees to have access to a compiler.
IIRC, they keep other compilers out of their ecosystem partly by also
BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:
Dunno about modern MacOS land, apparently there people use Apple's tools
and (unlike pretty much everyone else at this point) they charge
subscription fees to have access to a compiler.
The Apple developer tool suite is free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode
IIRC, they keep other compilers out of their ecosystem partly by also
GCC is available for MacOS. Install homebrew, then 'brew install gcc'.
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