[krueger71]

I remember back in the late 90's when I was studying Computer Science at Lund University, Sweden. They had a research focus in compilers and had their own Simula-compiler if I remember correctly. When they taught compilers, students first had to take the low level programming course where you needed to build a compiler back-end for an in-house IL. The first compiler course you could take after that was very focused on the practical aspects of building a front-end for the back-end you already had. Theory was pretty minimalistic at this point if I remember correctly. You got the hang of basic operator precendence parsing with a recommendation to use if for the expressions in our toy language and recursive decent for the rest. Of course this was almost like throwing someone at the deep end of the pool and se what happens. A grueling course that was renowned by students to be one of the more work intensive in the whole curriculum at that time. A lot of late nights in the computer lab for sure.

Afterwards, when I had the second more theoretical compiler course, I did feel that all that practical hard work to make a fully functioning compiler with mostly elbow grease gave an appreciation of the theoretical constructs that could make this more tractable.