[pxc]

I took compilers twice— I had to drop it the first time because I chose to use a different language and tools than the rest of the class, and the parser generator I chose didn't accommodate the kinds of error messages we needed to produce. The issue only became clear to me a few months into the class.

The second time I took it, things were relaxed a bit— the curriculum was designed around working in a high-level language (Java) and we got to write an interpreter for a nice intermediate form based on a simple VM instead of compiling all the way down to machine code.

So there were definitely some differences and they did make things easier! But I still remember this as one of my favorite classes, and I'd love to take it again and go 'all the way'.

Why do you say it was a 'long semester'?

[czscout]

It seems like a lot of CS majors find compilers to be the hardest course of the degree, indeed, it was the capstone for my degree. I found it to be quite fun and not particularly intensive once you wrapped your head around each new concept. I found CS Theory and Operating Systems to be much more difficult material, although both of those courses had less actual work.