Examiners: Time: 4 hours Prof P.D. Terry Marks: 180 Prof P. Blignault Venue: Hamilton Laboratory
You will receive material relating to Section B at 08h00 on Sunday 22 June, the day before the examination. No details will be given until then, but it is safe to assume that Section B will comprise a set of tasks that you could answer in a laboratory situation, similar in complexity and content to exercises you have done this year.
This year you will receive a challenging problem at 08h00 and be encouraged to develop a solution. Later in the day you will receive further hints as to how this problem should be solved (by then you might have worked this out for yourselves, of course). You will be encouraged to study the problem and the hints in detail, because during the examination on Monday you will be set further questions relating to the system - for example, asked to extend the system in certain ways. It is my hope that if you have really understood the material on Sunday, these questions will have solutions that come readily to mind, but of course you will have to answer these on your own!
You might like to have a look at some 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.
The "24 hour" problems have all been designed so that everyone should have been able to produce at least the basic solution, 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 machine-readable solutions 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 experiment in detail. If you feel confident, then you are free to produce a complete working solution to Section B during the examination. If you feel more confident writing out a neat detailed solution or extensive summary of the important parts of the solution, then that is quite acceptable. Many of the best solutions over the last few years have taken that form.
Please take note of the following summary of those sections of the textbook that are examinable. The complete (published) book has some sections that are not examinable.
Chapter 1 - All
Chapter 2 - All
Chapter 3 - All
Chapter 4 - All except 4.11 and 4.12
Chapter 5 - 5.1 ... 5.9
Chapter 6 - 6.1 ... 6.4
Chapter 7 - All
Chapter 8 - 8.1 ... 8.8. Sections 8.7 and 8.8 need not be known in detail, only the material that was
covered in practicals.
Chapter 9 - All
Chapter 10 - All, but only in the sense that there might be "practical" type questions that would require you
to develop or annotate a Cocol grammar, which by now you should be able to do, I hope.
Chapter 11 - 11.5 describes the implementation of the Label class used in chapters 13 and 14.
Chapter 12 - All
Chapter 13 - 13.1 ... 13.5
Chapter 14 - 14.1 ... 14.5
Chapter 15, 16 None
It has become a long-standing tradition (now going back far longer than most of you have been alive) for the Terrys to host a party for those who manage to survive Professor Pat's Perilous Programming courses. By consensus it has been decided to delay this until after the final exams in November.
There are many terms that you should make sure you understand and can define succinctly.
To help you search for terms you don't know, I have temporarily put a PDF file of "the Book" at
http://www.scifac.ru.ac.za/csc301compilers.pdf
Please do not redistribute this copy further, as it actually infringing copyright to do so.
Abstract syntax tree (AST) Optimizing compilers Alphabet Orthogonality Ambiguity Overflow Analytic phase Phrase structure Attribute Portability Back end Postfix notation Backpatching Pragma Backtracking Precedence BNF Produces directly Character handler Productions Closure Program counter Cocol Pseudo-code Code generation Range checks Compile-time Regular expression Constraint analysis Regular grammar Context condition Reverse Polish Notation Cycle-free grammar Run-time Dangling else Scanner Decompiler Scope Decorated tree Self-embedding Defining occurrence Semantic action Dereferencing Semantic attributes Dynamic semantics Semantically driven parser EBNF Semantic error detection Emulator Semantic overtones Environment Semantics Fetch-execute cycle Sentence FIRST function and sets Sentential form FOLLOW function and sets Source handling Frame file Source language Front end Stack frame Goal symbol Stack pointer Grammar Start symbol High-level translator State diagram Host language State variable Instruction set Static semantics Intermediate code Symbol Interpreter Symbol table JIT compilation Syntactic class Keywords Syntax Kleene closure Syntax directed translation Language Systems program Lexeme T-diagram Lexical analyser Table-driven algorithm Lexicon Target language LL(1) conflict resolution Terminal start sets LL(1) restrictions Terminal successors LL(k) parsing Token Macro assembler Top-down parsing Native code Type checking Non-terminal Vocabulary Null production Weak separator Nullable Weak terminal Object language Zero address instruction