Compiler Design

Everything has a mother or a father, sort of, everything must be created first by someone or something and when we talk about compilers Grace Hopper is the one we should be looking for, as the title says, Grace Hopper is called the mother of compilers because she rightly won herself that name in an era where there were already computers and everyone had to wrote programs depending on which computer they we working with and not everyone could write programs because it usually required big knowledges in mathematics she thought that thing should change and because of that she developed what has come to know as the first compiler next to the first programming language for a more common use COBOL so more people could use computers and program things that would help them in the different task, if you know about compilers you will understand that this is not a trivial task, even more considering the time in which she was working where this area was completely new, because of this we can assu...

For this week’s blog, we listened to the podcast about more or less how the gcc compiler works. I find interesting the fact that the compilers has 3 levels, these levels are crucial to the correct functioning of the compiler, because this compiler has to work on different platforms, operating systems and computer architecture. This approach makes the compiler modular, so the front end of the compiler only has to worry about the analysis of the source file and parses it into a tree called the abstract syntax tree. I’ve always wondered how a compiler get all the information from the code and execute everything in the right manner, specially recursion, that is something that blows my mind when I use it (specifically because it generally takes me more time to debug a recursion in comparison with an iterative approach). On the podcast they talked about the abstract syntax tree, which is a tree based on the hierarchy of each operation that was once source code. It is very fascinatin...

 This reading is called “The Hundred-Year Language” and the idea behind this reading is that we live in a time in which everything around us is evolving, mainly technology which nowadays has changed many things in our society, how we interact with each other, how we search for things, how we even buy things and overall everything that we have of technology right now would have been impossible many years ago, if we compare the first computer to the device in which I’m writing this entry right now, first of all the first computer was giant, while this device fits in my backpack and has several times more power than that first computer, this is crazy and the rate in which this technology evolves is amazing, in some years perhaps my phone is going to be far more portable than my computer, and far more powerful and well this is the world we live in right now, a world where everything has evolved for the best, right? Well the answer is that no, some things have been left behind and one o...