[sitkack]

I want to thank you for this pedagogical tool, I have used a couple times to learn a new language by porting this exercise.

How did you use this in your teaching? It seems like it could the basis for a longer term project that students could take in many directions.

[feeley]

tinyc.c was designed to illustrate three things at once in a second year course on concepts of programming languages. The course had 4 parts: imperative programming (using C), functional programming (using Scheme), and logic programming (using Prolog), and programming language implementation. For the imperative programming part it was important to show enough of the C language for the following operating systems course, so we needed to show C manual memory management and pointers in a rather detailed way. So tinyc.c was principally an example of programming with pointers, including pointer arithmetic such as *pc++. It was indirectly an example of compiler and interpreter, subjects we also covered in the course. I have also used parts of the compiler in a third year compiler course but not as the basis of a project. I have always asked (forced?) my students to use Scheme to implement their compiler projects... a much friendlier language than C for compiler writing.