CSE450: Translation of Programming Languages

Fall Semester, 2024

Instructor: Charles Ofria (ofria@cse.msu.edu) Office: ISTB 1103

TA: Thad Greiner (greine30@msu.edu)

Web page: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse450/

Meeting time & Room: M/W 12:40-2pm, STEM 2201

Office Hours:

• Instructor: after class + by appointment
• TA: Tu/Th 6-7pm (over Zoom; see Piazza for link) + by appointment

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Handouts

• Syllabus
• Schedule (Tentative)
• Practice Quiz 2

Projects

• Project 1: Lexical Analysis
• Project 2: Symbol Tables, Flow Control, and Syntax Analysis
• Project 3: Types, Semantic Analysis, and WebAssembly Output
• Project 4: Functions and Strings

Lectures

• (8/26) Lecture 1 - Course Introduction
• (8/28) Lecture 2 - Lexing and Regular Expressions
• (9/4) Lecture 3 - Writing a Lexer
• (9/9) Lecture 4 - Symbol Tables
• (9/11) Lecture 5 - Introduction to Parsing
• (9/16) Lecture 6 - Hacking a Parser
• (9/18) Lecture 7 - Project 2 Overview & Discussion (no slides)
• (9/23) Lecture 8 - Live Coding: WordLang (Building a simple parser)
• (9/25) Lecture 9 - Live Coding: WordLang (Constructing an abstract syntax tree)
• Optional Videos:
  1: WordLang Updates: Infrastructure (11:39),
  2: WordLang Updates: ASTNode (14:55),
  3: WordLang Updates: SymbolTable (12:22),
  4: WordLang Updates: Parsing Helpers (14:49),
  5: WordLang Updates: Parsing (15:44)
• (9/30) Lecture 10 - Parsing rules review and discussion
• (10/2) Lecture 11 - Live Coding: WordLang (Executing the Parse tree)
• (10/7) Lecture 12 - Live Coding: WordLang (Implementing binary expressions)
• (10/9) Lecture 13 - Open Discussion about Project 2
• (10/14) Lecture 14 - Semantic Analysis Overview
• (10/16) Lecture 15 - Implementing Multiple Types in WordLang
• (10/23) Lecture 16 - Introduction to Project 3
• (10/28) Lecture 17 - Writing code in WebAssembly
• (10/30) Lecture 18 - Flow Control in WebAssembly
• (11/4) Lecture 19 - Other oddities in WebAssembly
• (11/6) Lecture 20 - Open Discussion about Project 3
• (11/11) Lecture 21 - Lexer Generators
• (11/13) Lecture 22 - Implementing Functions in WebAssembly
• (11/18) Lecture 23 - Introduction to Project 4
• (11/20) Lecture 24 - Memory management in WebAssembly
• (11/25) Lecture 25 - Theory and Practice of Memory Management

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Links

Course-specific Tools

• Piazza - Site for all Q&A and online discussion.
• The Emplex C++ Lexer Generator - a tool for generating lexer objects in C++ based on a set of provided regular expressions.
• The GitHub repository for WordLang, our sample compiler implementation.

WebAssembly Text References

• Mozilla Guide to WebAssembly Text (WAT) programming
• Mozilla WebAssembly Text instruction reference
• Chart of WebAssembly Instructions

Other External References

• A Glossary of Compiler Terms (by Gordon S. Novak Jr., University of Texas at Austin)
• Graphviz (a useful package for visualizing abstract syntax trees, among other things)
• The Wikipedia page for Lexical Analysis
• The Wikipedia page for Abstract Syntax Trees