Formal Languages and Compilation

State of books on compilers The book collects and condenses the experience of years of teaching compiler courses and doing research on formal language theory, on compiler and l- guage design, and to a lesser extent on natural language processing. In the turmoil of information technology developments, the subject of the book has kept the same fundamental principles over half a century, and its relevance for theory and practice is as important as in the early days. This state of a?airs of a topic, which is central to computer science and is based on consolidated principles, might lead us to believe that the acc- panying textbooks are by now consolidated, much as the classical books on mathematics. In fact this is rather not true: there exist ?ne books on the mathematical aspects of language and automata theory, but the best books on translators are sort of encyclopaedias of algorithms, design methods, and practical know-how used in compiler design. Indeed a compiler is a mic- cosm, featuring avarietyofaspectsrangingfromalgorithmicwisdomto CPU andmemoryexploitation.Asaconsequencethetextbookshavegrowninsize, and compete with respect to their coverage of the last developments on p- gramming languages, processor architectures and clever mappings from the former to the latter.