Preface
“Why learn compilers?” – that is a question many of our students have asked us in our teaching career. We have given various answers – sometimes serious, sometimes only partially serious, but here are two quotes which we like:
“If you don’t understand compilers, you can still write programs – you can even be a competent programmer – but you can’t be a master.”
– Hal Abelson, MIT
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.”
– Steve Yegge
The study of compilation techniques is integration of many things a Computer Science/Engineering student learns separately – Data Structures, Algorithms, Theory of Automata ...
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