Compiler Construction

Course in Theoretical CS, Summer 2014

21.02.2014: page set up

Type

Day

Time

Place

Start

Lecturer

Mon

14:15-15:45

AH 6

7 April

Noll

Wed

10:15-11:45

AH 6

9 April

Noll

Ü2

Fri

08:15-09:45

AH 2

11 April

The goal of this course is to introduce foundational methods and techniques for implementing compilers for high-level (procedural) programming languages. The following topics will be discussed:

Lexical analysis of programs (Scanner)
Syntactic analysis of programs (Parser)
Semantic analysis of programs
Code generation
Tools for compiler construction

Basic knowledge of the relevant undergraduate courses of the first two years is required:

Programming (essential concepts of imperative and object-oriented programming languages and elementary programming techniques)
Data structures and algorithms (lists, stacks, queues, trees and associated algorithms)
Formal languages and automata theory (regular and context-free languages, finite and pushdown automata)

No.	Date	Subject	Slides	Handout
1	7 April	Introduction
2	9 April
3	14 April
4	16 April	[Exercise class]
5	23 April
6	28 April
7	30 April
8	12 May
9	14 May
10	19 May
11	21 May
12	26 May
13	28 May
14	2 June	[Itestra]
15	4 June	[Itestra]
16	16 June
17	18 June
18	23 June
19	25 June
20	30 June
21	2 July
	7 July
22	9 July
23	14 July
24	16 July

First exam: TBD
Review of first exam: TBD
Second exam: TBD
Review of second exam: TBD

Lecture (TBD)
Exercises (TBD)

The course will entirely be given in German. The slides and other course material will be in English. There are no lecture notes (yet); the course material will consist of slides.
The form of the exam (oral/written) will be announced in the beginning of the course.

A. Aho, M.S. Lam, R. Sethi, J.D. Ullman: Compilers – Principles, Techniques, and Tools; 2nd ed. Addison-Wesley, 2007.
A.W. Appel, J. Palsberg: Modern Compiler Implementation in Java. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
D. Grune, H.E. Bal, C.J.H. Jacobs, K.G. Langendoen: Modern Compiler Design. Wiley & Sons, 2000.
R. Wilhelm, D. Maurer: Übersetzerbau, 2. Auflage. Springer, 1997.

General:
- Wikipedia: Compiler [in German]
- The Catalog of Compiler Construction Tools [outdated]
Lexical Analysis:
- flex: The Fast Lexical Analyzer
Syntactic Analysis:
- Wikipedia: LL parser
- Wikipedia: LR parser
- Andreas Kunert: LR(k)-Analyse für Pragmatiker [in German]
- Bison: The GNU parser generator
- Wikipedia: Comparison of [scanner and] parser generators

BSc/MSc/Diploma Topics
Teaching WS 2012/13
Hybrid Systems Group

We are looking for a HiWi for the Compiler Construction course. If you are interested, please contact Thomas Noll.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been appointed as a member of the renowned Academia Europaea (Academy of Europe), a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy whose members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research.

Vacancies for postdoctoral researchers in "Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Programs". Application deadline: August 15, 2013.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship from the RWTH Aachen University.

The Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC'13) conference in Philadelphia has been very successful: Hongfei Fu received the best student paper award for his paper "Approximating acceptance probabilities of CTMC-paths on multi-clock deterministic timed automata". Besides, the paper by Ilya Tkachev, Alexandru Mereacre, Alessandro Abate and Joost-Pieter Katoen was ranked second in the overall best paper award selection.

Joost-Pieter Katoen has been elected as Steering Committee Chair of ETAPS (www.etaps.org), the largest conference on theory and practice of software in Europe. He is the first non-UK ETAPS SC chair since the conference was initiated in 1998. More information here.

The Alumni-Magazine of RWTH Aachen University contains an interview with our former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Tingting Han.

HiWi's wanted to work in a new European Space Agency project for enhancing state-of-the-art design and analysis tools (COMPASS) for the next generation European rockets. Need programming and model checking affinity. See here for details and contact.

We offer openings for several PhD candidates in the area of
"Model-Based Design and Analysis for Dependable Software Systems". Deadline for application: September 14, 2012. For further information click here.

The Theory of Hybrid Systems Group offers two jobs as student assistants within the CEBug project. For more information, look here.

Dino Distefano received the prestigious Roger Needham Award for his work on software verification. This award is for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher who has completed up to 10 years of post-doctoral research. Dr. Distefano was the first PhD student supervised by Joost-Pieter Katoen.

Marijn Jongerden received the German MMB (Messung, Modellierung und Bewertung von Rechensystemen) Award 2012 of the GI/ITG-Committee for Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computing Systems for his PhD-thesis on "Model-based energy analysis of battery powered systems". His work was supervised by Boudewijn Haverkort (Twente) and Joost-Pieter Katoen.

Our paper "Formal Correctness, Safety, Dependability and Performance Analysis of a Satellite" has been accepted to ICSE 2012 in the track SE in Practice (18% acceptance rate). The paper treats a new satellite from the European Space Agency that was modeled and analyzed with modern tools during the actual satellite design.

Joost-Pieter Katoen will act as DJ in the "Nacht der Professoren" in the Apollo bar and cinema.