Examiners: Time: 3 hours Prof P.D. Terry Marks: 180 Prof E.H. Blake Venue: Hamilton Compass Laboratories
The question will be revealed in its entirety at 08h00 on the day (provisionally Sunday 9 June) before the examination. No details will be given until then, but it is safe to assume that it will be a question that you could answer in a laboratory situation, similar in complexity and content to exercises you have done this year.
You might like to have a look at the old examinations on the Web Pages to see the sort of standard expected - but remember that old exam papers are "context sensitive" as they apply to a particular course at a particular time that covered material in slightly different ways to the course done this year. These problems were all designed so that everyone should have been able to do at least the basic solutions, with scope given for top students to demonstrate their understanding of the subtler points of parsing, scanning and compiling. Each year I have been astounded at the quality of some of the solutions received, and I trust that this year will be no exception!
Please note that there will be no obligation to produce a machine-readable solution in the examination (in fact doing so is quite a risky thing, if things go wrong for you, or if you cannot type quickly!). The tools will be provided before the examination so that you can try out your ideas, and if you feel bold, then reproduce a complete working solution with all misteaks eliminated during the examination.
Please take note of the following summary of those sections of the textbook that are examinable:
Chapter 1 - All
Chapter 2 - All
Chapter 3 - All
Chapter 4 - All except 4.3
Chapter 5 - All except 5.10 and 5.11
Chapter 6 - Not examinable
Chapter 7 - Not examinable
Chapter 8 - All
Chapter 9 - All
Chapter 10 - All except 10.6
Chapter 11 - All except 11.5
Chapter 12 - All, but this chapter will be available as "free information"
Chapter 13 - Not examinable (we have done other case studies instead)
Chapter 14 - All except 14.8
Since we concentrated on Coco/R generated systems, sub-
sections 14.2.1, 14.4.1, 14.5.1. 14.6.1 which refer to
hand-crafted compilers, are effectively irrelevant.
Chapter 15 - All except 15.3
Chapter 16 - Examinable to the extent that was needed for the last prac, and
but you should understand the broad outlines of using stack frames
and allocating memory for multi-function programmes using the other
models discussed in lectures.
Chapter 17 - Not examinable in detail
Chapter 18 - Not examinable
It has become a long-standing tradition (now going back far longer than any of you have been alive) for the Terrys to host a party for those who manage to survive Professor Pat's Perilous Programming courses. Tentatively we propose to hold this on the evening of Wednesday 12 June, by which stage you will have written both examinations.
There are many terms that you should make sure you understand and can define accurately, such as:
Abstract syntax tree (AST) One and a half address code Alphabet Optimization Ambiguity Orthogonality Analytic phase Overflow Attribute Phrase structure Back end Portability Backpatching Postfix notation Backtracking Pragma BNF Precedence Character handler Produces directly Chomsky hierarchy Productions Closure Program counter Cocol Pseudo-code Code generation Range checks Compile-time Regular expression Constraint analysis Regular grammar Context condition Reverse Polish Cycle-free grammar Run-time Dangling else Scanner Decompiler Scope Decorated tree Self-embedding Defining occurrence Semantic action Dereferencing Semantic attributes Deterministic finite automaton (DFA) Semantic driven parser Dynamic semantics Semantic error detection EBNF Semantic overtones Emulator Semantics Environment Sentence Fetch-execute cycle Sentential form Finite state automata (FSA) Source handling FIRST function and sets Source language FOLLOW function and sets Stack frame Frame file Stack pointer Front end Start symbol Goal symbol State diagram Grammar State variable High-level translator Static semantics Host language Symbol Instruction set Symbol table Intermediate code Syntactic class Interpreter Syntax Keywords Syntax directed translation Kleene closure Systems program Language T-diagram Lexeme Table-driven algorithm Lexical analyser Target language Lexicon Terminal start sets LL(1) conflict resolution Terminal successors LL(1) restrictions Three-address code LL(k) parsing Token Macro assembly Top-down parsing Native code Two-address code Non-terminal Type checking Null production Vocabulary Nullable Weak separator Object language Weak terminal One-address code Zero address instruction