Compiler Construction - The Art of Niklaus Wirth
Hanspeter Mössenböck · 2000
Niklaus Wirth is not only a master of language design but also a pioneer of compiler construction. For four decades he has refined his techniques for building simple, efficient and reliable compilers. This paper tries to collect some general principles behind his work. It is not a paper about new compilation techniques but a reflection about Wirth's way to write compilers. 1 Introduction Among the numerous research topics that Niklaus Wirth approached during his professional career, programming languages and their compilers clearly was the dominating theme. There is hardly anybody in Computer Science who has such a deep insight into language design as Niklaus Wirth. Since the early sixties he has been active in this field and has contributed such seminal languages as Algol-W, Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon. And being an engineer, he was always as much concerned about the simplicity and efficiency of his compilers as about the elegance of his languages. In this paper I will try to s...