Compiler Design

  This was a trip down memory lane with the courses that I took with professor Ariel, remembering Ruby and Lisps taking some characteristics that we saw during the course and combining the tools into a framework with the purpose of teaching and learning was pretty interesting , I don’t remember reading this paper befor e in any of those courses even tough is related, I guess it better if we have knowledge of all the previous courses plus this one to understand it better.   The paper is more like a manual for other teachers or maybe course program designers so they can understand the framework and also to defend it application on a learning environment, it quite interesting this approach to teaching especially considering the paper has been here for a long time and in the time of witting would have been a pretty new form of teaching . Understanding the innerworks by doing and even extending the tool used for learning is both a pretty good way to learn and to test the knowle

  We owe a lot of we have today to Hopper, she didn’t took into account usual conventions, that’s probably why she was so ahead of her time , not taking as a given your “role” as a woman in those time was difficult , really difficult , it was an all the way up against almost all the people in you life.   She even had to learn all about computers on the fly, although she had a mathematics background it is still difficult to learn that much specially of society is not on your side , but it seemed she found a home in the army, where her abilities were not underestimated and she was considered a valuable asset to the forces .   She was immersed deep in her work; I would say her work was her life and vice versa , even thinking wide and proposing that a computer should be easier to use , and she end up writing a compiler, breaking though most of the techniques that are still in use today, but making the first time was not easy at all, it should have taken an enormous amount of

  First interesting thing that came to mind is the new trend of the processors to have more cores a ta c k le better more parallelizable tasks, so compilers must change to take better advantage of the advancements in technology, surely considering where the technology is going, while in past years the focus was to increase the instructions per cycle and the clock speed of the processor , the truth is that there are physical limits to the minimum size of a chip, and we are reaching them pretty fast with our x86 architecture .   The modularity of the components of gcc is also pretty impressive , it also makes sense, at one end the thing that changes is the language you are reading and interpreting, once you get to a universal structure the process of the gcc compiler should be the same and the front end and back end could be interchangeable while the middle end remains the same, so it reminds me a lot of the blocks we used to construct compilers and interpreters   It was very imp