University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
                Department of Computer Science

                SPRING 1994 COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT

              COMP 140: Introduction to Translators
                         3.0 hours credit
             Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45pm
                       Sitterson 014

INSTRUCTOR: Terry S. Yoo, 962-1875, <yoo@cs.unc.edu> SN 309

PREREQUISITES:

     COMP 120: Computer Organization (corequisite)
     COMP 121: Data Structures       (hard prerequisite)

PURPOSE:
     This is an upper level undergraduate course covering several
areas  of  program translation.  This includes but is not limited
to, assembly, linking, loading, macro processing, interpretation,
and compilation.

     Students will explore the process of understanding high lev-
el  languages  and  translating  the information into machine in-
structions.  Some discussion of the impact of computer  architec-
ture  on  translator  design will be covered as well as the rudi-
ments of lexical analysis and parsing.

     The goal of the course will be to frame  the  often  complex
process  of  how  software  written  in high level languages gets
translated "down to the iron" or to the  final  machine  instruc-
tions,  bridging the gap between software and hardware.  Students
will be able to understand the foundations of compiler technology
and  generate parsers for "little languages" (for user interfaces
and other input streams).

TEXT           Leland Beck, "Systems Software: An Introduction to
               Systems Programming," Chapters 1-5.

GradING: Exams Quiz (5%)
               Midterm (10%)
               Final (35%)

     Homeworks Three programming projects (40%)
               Problem sets (10%)