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6 lines
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6 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
Project 10 was a nice shift from the low-level system building I'd been doing- finally working with language structure and grammar. The modular design philosophy I'd been using since Project 6 carried over well. The JackTokenizer and CompilationEngine split followed the same Parser/CodeWriter pattern from my VM translator, just dealing with a much richer set of tokens and grammar rules. Building the tokenizer was actually straightforward- it's essentially just string parsing that I've done plenty of times before. The comment handling was trickier than expected though, with multi-line comments that span across lines requiring state tracking between advance() calls.
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The compilation engine was where my algorithm/programming language design and computer systems (in CS, 306) courses finally clicked into place. Recursive descent parsing is just grammar rules implemented as methods that call each other- it was elegant, but only once I saw it. Each production rule maps directly to a method, and the recursive calls naturally build the parse tree (which I just so happen to be doing in CS 308, programming language design!). The XML output requirement was actually great for debugging since I could visually inspect the parse tree structure in a browser and catch parsing errors immediately. I hit some tricky edge cases with expression parsing- operator precedence, unary operators, and making sure the tokenizer advanced at exactly the right moments for complex constructs like array access and method calls.
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What really struck me was how this project revealed the hidden complexity of syntax analysis- something I'd always taken for granted as a programmer. Seeing how a parser actually breaks down source code according to grammar rules, handles precedence, and builds a structured representation gave me new appreciation for what happens before compilation even starts. Again, a great compliment to 308, as I'm learning the theory there and putting it into practice here.
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