Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (Most Likely) Never Design a Compiler

I never really thought about if I was ever going to work on compiler design, but now that I’ve read the paper I can say that even though I don’t, everything we’re studying is going to be useful. But this is something that we have seen many times in different aspects, for instance, one of my friends once told me that he uses the sequential logic of programming to make choices in his life. This is because we should get used to apply any knowledge in the areas that can be used.

  The original idea that compilers are programs used to translate a high-level programming language to machine code wasn’t something in my head. Since the very first class I realized that we were going to learn how to do a translator, and I told my classmates about that. We will learn how to interpret one language, how to read it, understand it, know its syntax and we will be able to teach the computer how to read it and get information from it. Then we will be able to do anything we want with that information like translating it to another language or use it for, I’m guessing, understand natural language or learn about the feelings involved in a text. There are countless uses of the skills we will be learning in this course.

  Something that might not be related to the main topic here (compilers) but I found interesting was that at the University of Arizona, teachers make their students build a translator from a subset of LaTeX to a subset of HTML without any knowledge about those two languages or anything about lex and yacc. I find those challenges very useful to encourage students to learn by themselves and to see that they (we) can do anything even if we don’t have all the knowledge. I mean, those challenges force us to bring out the best of us, improving exponentially our skills as professionals.