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C-Programming-Tools Fifth Lecture: released 3rd June 2021

d.white@imperial.ac.uk

I have just released the fifth and final lecture of my first year lectures on C Tools, building a toolbox of useful tools, and the craft skills to use them effectively, in order to make C programming easier. This final lecture covers the following single topic: Making Code Generator Tools easier - autogenerating parser and lexers. Building little languages easily by using parser generator and lexer generator tools (eg. the combination of Yacc/Bison, Lex/Flex, and datadec for Abstract Syntax Trees). Worked example of a tiny Haskell Subset, presented as a series of step by step examples. After parsing and building a parse tree, we do semantic checks, and then write an interpreter, and finally, we replace the interpreter with a Code generator which spits out C syntax, so without noticing it we end up writing a (tiny subset of) Haskell to C compiler. Better yet, we only write 14% of the code and our tools write the rest. Thoughts on an alternative parsing technique. Conclusions: use tools as much as you can. choose ones you like; become expert in their use. build a toolkit of trusted tools. Build your own tools where necessary. Define your own little languages, use parser generator tools to help.

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Here are the lecture materials (slides and associated examples - of which there are many):

• Here are the full size lecture notes (PDF), ie. with one slide per page.
• Here are the 4-up lecture notes (PDF), ie. with 4 slides per page.
• And here's the C Tools tarball, as a gzipped tar file:
  • Download this into your home directory,
  • Then extract the contents via: tar xzf c-tools-lecture5.tgz
  • This creates a directory called c-tools-lecture5
  • Explore the c-tools-lecture5 directory, I suggest you start with the top level README and Makefile.
• Here are the 2 videos in Panopto:
  • C Tools Lecture 5 Part 1
  • C Tools Lecture 5 Part 2

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d.white@imperial.ac.uk Updated: June 2021

Back to my C Tools Lectures Pages.

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