KOI: Course content and plan for the lectures

"ALSU-07" is the textbook by Aho, Lam, Sethi and Ullman (the "purple dragon book" from 2007). The book has a web site: dragonbook.stanford.edu
"ASU-86" is the older edition of the same book, by Aho, Sethi and Ullman (the "red dragon book" from 1986)

This page, and other pages on the course web, contain some references to texts and other resources about compiler technology, but the content of the course consists of:

  1. The sections from ALSU-07 listed below
  2. The summary Grammatiker för datorspråk (also available in English: Grammars for computer languages)
  3. The summary Grammatiktransformationer (also available in English: Grammar Transformations)
  4. The summary The Very Basics of Garbage Collection (only in English)
  5. Lab assignments (only in English)

Plan for the lectures

When lectures are given live, some adjustments may occur.

The links are to my own lecture notes, which may or may not be useful as a summary of the content. There are also videos of these lectures.

  1. Compilers - what, how and why?
  2. Syntax and grammars
  3. Syntactic analysis ("parsing"). A very simple compiler.
  4. More about syntactic analys. Bottom-up parsing. Parser-generators.
  5. Yacc and Bison
  6. Lexical analysis ("scanning"). Lex and Flex. Regular expressions.
  7. Syntax-directed translation. Building syntax trees.
  8. Run-time environments
  9. Executing the syntax tree. Stack machines.
  10. Type systems och type checking
  11. Intermediate code and optimization
  12. Code generation
  13. Not a lecture: Some exercises as a review (in Swedish)

Thomas Padron-McCarthy (thomas.padron-mccarthy@oru.se), August 25, 2025