Making Compiler Design Relevant for Students who will (most likely) Never Design a Compiler

This article is pretty interesting, mostly for the nature of the topic that it's treating, and it's curious the focus on the utility around having a compiler design course. The first interesting thing for me is the intention of the author around giving "real life" examples for applications of the knowledge that you can obtain into the compiler's course.

The first example that the article gives us is the usage of translation as the base for interesting programs, being the first one translating plain text into graphics, this one is very clear even having some phases just the same as the ones that we get in the compiling process, having as utility to understand this process in order to facilitate the solution of the graphics problem.

Just in the same thinking line we have the translation from a LaTeX document formatting to an HTML format. Even as described, that this problem has not the same "translating phases" but even with that, at least the initial stages of the solution for this are just look like the first two of the compiler's phases.

After this, the author continues giving us some interesting examples, but this time related to each of the phases of the compiler, having in first place the lexical analysis and parsing. The example this time is related to a Database and a hospital, but in this case I find interesting that the utility of a translation gets importance because of the front-end and a user related thinking, in order to make easier the learning of a system for the users, is that you could translate and do the effort for translating into way more simple language for usage.

For not sounding that repetitive, the idea of applying into the "real world" the concepts of compiler's design is the core for the article, and I find it fascinating, even when the examples seem a little over specific, I think having this kind of incentive for making an effort in this course, makes things way easier.

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