Compiler Design

Grace Hopper aka the mother of Cobol, was an amazing woman, who helped the US Navy, helped to pressure the industry to make computers and computing more accessible, helped to bring research and career interests to women. I really like when I find out the achievements of women, especially in my field, it gives me chills all over me. She studied in one of the most prestige schools in US, Yale, to gain her master's degree and then a doctorate in maths and mathematical physics. Just after the US entered second world war Hopper jump into the team being assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation project at Harvard. As you can see, Hopper was a super capable person. Another of her contributions to the computer world was that she was one of the first persons to bring a name for "bugs" being a bug. I did not even know that we call bugs because there was an actual bug in the machine. But not only she contributed to all of these I just mentioned, but she also was one of the firs...

In episode 61 of Software Engineering Radio the guest was Dr. Morgan Deters, who was a senior research scientist at the Courant Institute of New York University, titled "Internals of GCC". The whole podcast talks about how GCC works internally, which is a project of GNU. Dr. Morgan lists all the steps of a GNU Compiler Collection, from programming languages to processor binary code generation.  I have only heard the concept of GCC only when I have compiled programs of c and c++, but I never thought that it could compile more programming languages, I did not know what it does. Dr. Morgan explains three important parts: Front-End, Middle-End (which actually it's its proper name) and Back-End. At first, I was a little confused because I have never heard the term Middle-End, but later he will explain at detail.  Front-End was described as a type of black-box that converts the input- into a tree who will help later in the next phases. The Middle-End takes the output of ...

It's hard to believe a life without java, at least for me. Java was the second programming language I learned to program, immediately I fell in love with it. And to think in the future it may disappear it make me feel blue. I know that languages evolve and that some have a dead-end like Cobol. But maybe java won't disappear, maybe the author was making a wrong assumption, maybe java it's the beginning of a new era of programming languages. One thing I have clear is that the programming languages are going to be much better hundred-years from now. And the saddest thing is that no one of us reading this is going to be alive to check them. If Moore's law is still relative. The programming languages we have now won't be working, they CPUs will be 70quintilion-ish faster than ours. They will be needing programming languages that can communicate with that CPU power. One statement that the author gives us is "If you have the opportunity to program in one of those ...