In article <chr### [at] netplexaussieorg> , 
Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom>  wrote:

> BTW, know of any good sites with information on VM/compiler design?

The best intro book I have to compiler design was written in German, see
<http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/books/Compilerbau1/>.

However, <http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/books/CompilerConstruction/> is
the English edition of the same book.  I checked, and Barnes and Noble asks
it for $52 new, which I have to say is absolutely unreasonable, the German
edition did only cost 40 DM, which is about $20.  You can probably get it
used for much less as Amazon says it is out of print.

The nice thing about this book compared to some other books I have is that
rather than showing off the author is very straight to the point.  In many
other books I have found complicated and unreadable notation to scare people
and show what complex language theory examples the authors can imagine, yet
all those have zero practical use.  In particular I should warn you not to
get "Modern Compiler Implementation in XXX", where XX is C/C++/Pascal/Java.
They simply edited the example sin the book with tons of errors for each
different target language, and the book does not cover a compiler to a
useful language.

This is different in Wirth's book, which uses a subset of the language
Oberon, a successor to Pascal.  All examples are extremely easy to read and
understand.  Even more important, it is very show, less than 200 pages while
it covers absolutely everything you need to know without getting
side-tracked.  Don't get me wrong, you neither need to know or be interested
in Oberon, it only delivers a IMO very effective means to communicate the
general ideas of compiler design.

For his development _of_ Pascal and Modula Wirth received the ACM Turing
Award in 1984, so there is no doubt he is qualified to write about compilers
either.

Once you have read it and gained some experience, I would strongly recommend
to get a copy of Muchnick's "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation"
book.  It covers all important optimization and intermediate representation
techniques developed in the past two decades.  Unfortunately it is $90, but
well worth it for the 850 packed pages.  Contrary to Wirth's book, it does
not go into implementation details but presents the different techniques in
a mostly independent fashion.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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