Compilerbouw, NL edition 1986

To the right we see the book in question. My friend FP happened to have this book in his private collection. Bought it on a bookmarket without any particular reason, years and years ago. And now it turns out to be a goldmine!

I have the 1994 german edition of Compiler construction. It is good, but rather difficult. I have the english version of 1996 (PDF format) and after having read it several times there are still quite some questions. Even the latest release (November 2005) does not shed some more light on matters.

And then FP showed me his book from over 20 years ago. And this book is a goldmine! I will list the golden nuggets below:

First book to use Modula-2 as programming language (Prior versions used Pascal)
The example program described is a PL/0 compiler/debugger/interpreter
PL/0 is a simple compiler, unlike Oberon-0, so it is easier to understand the basics
The PL/0 language is highly extensible
All sources are in Modula-2 (for the Logitech PL2/86 compiler)
All sources will become available in electronic form
The book starts at close to zero knowledge and ends quite some way up
Lots of graphs and explanations, in less than 125 pages!
Fully written in perfect dutch (my native language)

Since the book is out of print, I sterted a search on the internet. There was one major bookstore who still has the book for sale online. But if you order it, you get an error message. And if you go to the shop they will tell you it is out of sale and will not be reprinted.
So I took the liberty to copy the book in electronic form:

Scanned all pages at 200 DPI to form JPG images
Used 'gocr' for OCR-ing the JPG files
Used 'jed' for preprocessing the OCR-ed files
Used Abiword to re-assemble the chapters
Used ps2pdf to make one compact PDF file out of it

You can download the file through the download section. The PDF file is just 825 KB in size. The Abiword file is close to 4 MB! I just love ps2pdf!

The book may be in dutch, but you will be able to read the sources. Most of them will be published in these pages.

Although this book is in dutch I will keep addressing the world so this topic is in english as usual. One remark: when reformatting the OCR-ed texts with Abiword I ran into several small inconveniences. Like alterations that didn't stick although I did safe them.

So I was kind of in a hurry when the Abiword file was close to finished. In my hurry I forgot about the Appendix in which Teus de Jong tells about his home made TextWindows library which is needed by some of the published programs.
So I edited the file separately and made a separate PDF file for it as well. So if you download the book, don't forget to download the Appendix. Both can be downloaded via the download section.

In the book, sveral sources are published. I will publish each source, with some more explanation in separate files which are all part of the PL/0 topic. The sources covered are:

Source	Compiles	Subject
EBNF		Description of EBNF and make a parser for EBNF definition files. The first source is just to get started. The actual EBNF syntax checker is called 'GeneralParser'.

You can download the source files through the download section (consult the navigator frame on the right).

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