The Purple Dragonbook

I went to the post office today to pick up a package from Amazon UK. The package contained the purple Dragonbook (Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools) by Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman which is a classic in compiler design. Being a phd studendent working on programming languages it is a must have, and since a new edition has recently been published it was obvious to buy the book. I have agreed to review the book for the computer science association in Denmark (Datalogforeningen) which will be in danish, I expect to write a short summary here in English.

From the first look at the book I must say that I am excited. It looks really nice. I read some of the parts concerning parsers and it all seemed to make perfect sense from a first calsual reading. The reason I read about parser was my curiousity towards why approx. 200 pages out of approx. 1000 where devoted to lexical analysis and parsing. It seems a lot but from my first reading they also get into some of the stuff which is often left out of other compiler books.
I look forward to read the rest of the book and I will write a post when that happens.

Have a nice weekend.

Back from San Diego

Last week I returned from a great trip to San Diego where I visited the FCRC Conference. I attended the History of Programming Language conference (HOPL-III), the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), and finally I presented a paper at the Programming Language and Analysis for Security workshop, which was the main purpose of my trip.

The HOPL conference was a big hit, many good talks on why or why not succes of programming languages like AppleScript, Lua, Modula-2 and Oberon, ZPL, Erlang, C++, Haskel and Beta. For the first time I saw Niklaus Wirth the maker of Pascal, the first programming language I learned. He seemed a bit uncontent with the present state of programming language too much abstraction and too little focus on fast implementations. I disagree. Raising the level of abstraction is natural and good programming style, the compiler should do the hard work of optimizing the code.

PLDI was a good experience many good presentations. There where a lot of presentations after 10 hours of talks my head was spinning and dangrously close to mental overload. I meet a lot of people doing interesting research nice to experience the state of art this close.

PLAS was a good experience the presentation went well, and the questions easy to answer. The other presentations where interesting so it was a good day.

San Diego is a nice city. It felt like a good place to be, especially the Gas lamp quater was nice. Lots of resteurants and shops. And the weather was great, 25-35 degress celcious and a nice refreshing wind.

I have placed some pictures from my trip, see the menu on the right and select pictures. The hotel was fine but the decoration sucks big time looks like something some the early 80's :)

Qualification Exam - Passed

I have just passed my qualification exam based on my progress report "A Domain-specific Programming Language for Secure Multiparty Computation". I gave a 30 min. presentation based on the following slides. It all went pretty well during the presentation and the question/answer session afterwards was very enjoyable. The censor presented some interesting questions.

So now it is time for weekend, but first I have to fill out a ton of papirs for my stay abroad in the fall.

By the way all those pupils who where complaining about two having to have two exams at one day - stop crying! Besides the qualification exam I had an exam in Software Verification as well today, which I passed with flying colors :)

New version of the Java 5 SableCC grammar

I have made a small change to the Java 5 grammar in order to fix a bug concerning the ellipsis operator... see the file java5.sablecc for further information.

First Paper Accepted!!! :)

I got my first paper accepted. It was submitted to the Programming Language and Analysis for Security Workshop 2007, PLAS'07, and got accepted. This is very cool, and means that I will go to San Diego in June - nice rigth :)

I have just finished the last changes to the paper and submitted the final version which you can find on my Publications page, see the menu at the rigth.

Java5 Grammar for Sablecc - now with prettyprinter

I have made a pretty printer for the Java5 grammar, which I posted a couple of days ago. Both referenced here and here for easy download.

I have made a number of unit tests and ran the Emma code coverage tool on the tests. It show a blessing 91.3% code coverage. There is still 8.7% of the pretty printer which is not covered, so there might still be some bugs. If you find any bug in the grammar or prettyprinter please contact me, and I will fix it as sone as possible!

Java 5 Grammar for Sablecc 3.2

I have somehow come upon this Java 5 Grammar for Sablecc. I can't remember where I found it, thus I can not remember the name of the author, and nothing is mentioned in the file. If you know of who is the author, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I have choosen to publish it here since I have found it more than difficult to find a working implementation of the Java 5 grammar for Sablecc, and by doing so I hope others will not get into as much trouble finding it as I did.

[Edit June 8th. 2008] I have now identified the author of the grammar, Stefan Mandel, and contacted him. The grammar is released under the LGPL, and I have added a copyright notice.