Retargetable C Compiler, A: Design and Implementation

Good description of compilers without getting bogged down in theory.

A+ amazon seller, quick delivery, excellent book.

I wish all programmers made books like this one about their products. It would make life so much easier.This book contains literally all the code that you just concatenate together and get a full, working LCC compiler which I think is pretty cool. It's also the best form of commenting your code :v

Good book, but when I buy 'new' I don't want it damaged. This was the replacement order, and Amazon shipped in exactly the same way.

Got the package today, the book is in very nice condition. Excellent.

This book is definitely _not_ for beginners, but compilers are not supposed to be written by novices -- if there is rocket science in computers, it is compiler development. Crystal clear style and language make this book easy reading, and LCC is the best non-optimizing compiler I've seen (and believe me, I've seen many compiler sources): orthogonal, easy to follow design, well-thought data structures and overall architecture.I treat this book as a perfect collection of brilliant ideas, many of which you will find implemented in most commercial compilers.Whether it helps to write your own compiler? -- sure. Are you thinking about IR (internal representation) that will be easy to create and, most important, walk through and manipulate? -- take a look how Fraser et al did it; they did it well. Think how to write a front end or code generator? -- it's all there. Sure, blind copying won't work -- optimizing compiler will call for way more sophisticated BURG-like technique (one of the best known code generation techniques by now), but, all in all, it'll be BURG-like, and it's in the book as well.So, if you want to show your students (or learn yourself) how compilers should be written, you cannot find anything better than LCC accompanied by this book. Fraser's team did it right.

First of all, this book is not for starters in the area of compiler design. Starters in the area of compiler design who are looking for a 'cookbook', I recommend to read 'Programming Language Processors in Java: Compilers and Interpreters' by David Watt.Why do I like this book? Because it is a cookbook for a 'full blown' C Compiler in C itself. Well actually it's a compiler for a subset of C, but it is still very comprehensive!It offers a lot of code snippets which are really well commented about what/where/how.A disadvantage of this book is that it doesn't cover advanced topics such as code optimizations. This is the area where the action is right now. All other parts (scanning/parsing/etc) can be bought of the shelf.But it remain a very nice text, to give you an valuable insight in how a compiler could be implemented.

I bought this book several years ago, and still haven't managed to make my way through it. The text is sometimes hard to follow, the code fragments even harder, requiring the reader to jump back several (sometimes dozens of) pages to references made. This text seemed more suited to University level Computer Science students than to the average Joe Schmoe who just wants to write a C compiler. Overall, this is a good book that details the gory insides of a compiler very well, and the added bonus of being able to get the source code is essential, as viewing the complete code while reading the book is almost a necessity, but it's not for the average/intermediate level coder.

only bought it for the 3 different retargetable computer code, I use AHO and for a more complete compiler, I use Programming language processors in JAVA by Watt/Brown

Inhaltlich ist am Buch nichts auszusetzen, ganz im Gegenteil - einen detaillierten Einblick in Aufbau und Arbeitsweise eines Compilers wird man schwerlich anderenortes finden können. Schade ist die leider eher schlampige Ausführung - viele Seiten haben einen starken Grauschleier, wie man sie von Photokopien aus früheren Zeiten kennt. Zum Teil finden sich auch störende querlaufende graue Streifen. Die Form wird dem an sich hervorragenden Inhalt leider bei Weitem nicht gerecht. :-(