54 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
54 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
TUTOR.ZIP
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This file contains all of the installments of Jack Crenshaw's
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tutorial on compiler construction, including the new Installment 15.
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The intended audience is those folks who are not computer scientists,
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but who enjoy computing and have always wanted to know how compilers
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work. A lot of compiler theory has been left out, but the practical
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issues are covered. By the time you have completed the series, you
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should be able to design and build your own working compiler. It will
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not be the world's best, nor will it put out incredibly tight code.
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Your product will probably never put Borland or MicroSoft out of
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business. But it will work, and it will be yours.
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A word about the file format: The files were originally created using
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Borland's DOS editor, Sprint. Sprint could write to a text file only
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if you formatted the file to go to the selected printer. I used the
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most common printer I could think of, the Epson MX-80, but even then
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the files ended up with printer control sequences at the beginning
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and end of each page.
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To bring the files up to date and get myself positioned to continue
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the series, I recently (1994) converted all the files to work with
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Microsoft Word for Windows. Unlike Sprint, Word allows you to write
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the file as a DOS text file. Unfortunately, this gave me a new
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problem, because when Word is writing to a text file, it doesn't
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write hard page breaks or page numbers. In other words, in six years
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we've gone from a file with page breaks and page numbers, but
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embedded escape sequences, to files with no embedded escape sequences
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but no page breaks or page numbers. Isn't progress wonderful?
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Of course, it's possible for me to insert the page numbers as
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straight text, rather than asking the editor to do it for me. But
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since Word won't allow me to write page breaks to the file, we would
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end up with files with page numbers that may or may not fall at the
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ends of the pages, depending on your editor and your printer. It
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seems to me that almost every file I've ever downloaded from
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CompuServe or BBS's that had such page numbering was incompatible
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with my printer, and gave me pages that were one line short or one
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line long, with the page numbers consequently walking up the page.
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So perhaps this new format is, after all, the safest one for general
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distribution. The files as they exist will look just fine if read
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into any text editor capable of reading DOS text files. Since most
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editors these days include rather sophisticated word processing
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capabilities, you should be able to get your editor to paginate for
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you, prior to printing.
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I hope you like the tutorials. Much thought went into them.
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Jack W. Crenshaw
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CompuServe 72325,1327
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