C-Programming-Tools 2019 Fourth Lecture Materials

C-Programming-Tools Fourth Lecture: 6th June 2019, noon, LT308

d.white@imperial.ac.uk
I have just given the fourth 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.

Code generator spits out C, so without noticing it we end up writing a compiler that translates a tiny subset of Haskell to C, along the way.

Better yet, we only write 16% of the code and our tools write the rest.

New 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.

Fourth Lecture Materials Here

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-lecture4.tgz
This creates a directory called c-tools-lecture4
Explore the c-tools-lecture4 directory, I suggest you start with the top level README and Makefile.

d.white@imperial.ac.uk
Updated: 5th June 2019 Back to my C Tools Lectures Pages.