[northernskys30]

I did my CS degree at umontreal and this was an assignment in a second year class. This was a pretty interesting introduction to compilers, and even if this is a toy subset of C, this was challenging, at least for me. We would get 0 if there were any memory leak, so we were pretty paranoid about it.

The second assignment was writing a Scheme interpreter.

[ndiddy]

That's kind of surprising they cared so much about memory use, a lot of one-shot C programs such as compilers don't bother freeing memory and let the OS clean up after them once they exit.

[ComputerGuru]

I was about to comment and say the same thing, but as a graded learning exercise there is certainly value in that approach.