CSC362 2004S, Class 42: Evaluation and Wrapup

Overview:
* Evaluations
* Administrivia
* Thoughts on the class
* Final thoughts

Summarize and organize what we have learned this semester

Things about the implementation of compilers:
* The practical implementation of parsing was a lot harder than the theory would suggest
* The theory of parsing
  * How and why to deal with ambiguous grammars
  * SLR, LR, LL parsing
* The practice of parsing
* We only do theory on small languages; Big languages present new challenges
  * E.g., ambiguity
 
Things about the design of compilers:
* Many stages
* Lots of flexibility for the designer
* How many components there are

Things about machine architecture:
* Organization of memory
* Data movement
* Designing a good intermediate language is hard.  Never trust your CS prof to design one.

Things about program design:
* When you have many stages in the program, you need to design the early stages well or the later stages will be incredibly painful
* Even when it is supposed to be "easy" to combine parts of a program, it can be difficult (+ practical experience in combining parts)

General learning skills:
* Dealing with groups

Philosophical comments:
* Boy, this stuff is a pain
* Stuff that seems easy at the surface can be very very hard when you deal with all the details