Abstract
The emphasis of this course has been on the process of translation from high-levei to low-level languages: man-machine communication. It is all too easy to neglect the importance of communication in the other direction, but without effective machine-man communication, compilers are useless. Furthermore, if we are to be truly masters of our machines, we must insist that both parts of this dialogue be conducted in languages acceptable to us.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.
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© 1974 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Horning, J.J. (1974). What the Compiler Should Tell the User. In: Bauer, F.L., Eickel, J. (eds) Compiler Construction. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 21. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-21549-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-21549-4_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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