Improving compilers education through symbol tables animations

Abstract

This paper presents the evaluation of an educational tool focused on the visualization of the symbol table in the context of a compiler course. In a first evaluation we used simulation exercises and tested basic concepts of symbol tables. We detected efficiency improvements, students who used the tool completed the exercises with the same grading and significantly faster than the students who did not use the tool. In addition students' opinion was positive. In a second evaluation we used more active tasks, and tested students' skills on writing parser specifications regarding symbol table management. We have detected significant improvements. Students who used the tool outperformed those who did not use the tool in a 22%.

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“…Most of compiler education research is motivated by enhancing compiler education itself: Aiken [19], Resler and Deaver [20], Baldwin [21], Mernik and Žumer [22], Almeida-Martínez et al [23], and Urquiza-Fuentes et al [24], have developed a diversity of tools for enhancing and complementing their courses, and to share their proposals. A good compiler course combines data structures, algorithms, and tools for students as they build a large piece of software that performs an interesting and practical function [1].…”

“…Some others are functional, like MinimL [21], minCaml [31] and Sarkar et al's [33,34] (subset of Scheme). But the most are imperative/structured, much of them subsets of Pascal (or Pascal-like) like Resler and Deaver's example [20] (Pascal-like), Language X [35] (subset of Pascal), Niklaus Wirth's PL/0 [22] (subset of Pascal), Niklaus Wirth's Oberon [36] (Pascal-like), and SimplePascal [24]. Also there is another, C-like [18], and also compilers for another imperative languages [4].…”

“…Even some of them design their own pseudo-assembly language, like Evangelidis et al's [35] (similar to PL/0 Machine instruction set). Some compiler education tools and compiler design projects focuses so much in high-level compilation phases that lack of code generation analysis, like [22], [34], [23] and [24]. Gruner [4] even proposes a compiler design project whose target language is not low-level but classic BASIC with GOTO statement.…”

“…Its function is to interpret and represent visually the content of the XML created by VASTapi. Urquiza-Fuentes et al [24] developed SOTA (SymbOl Table Animation), an educational tool aimed at visualizing the working of a symbol table during the source code analysis.…”

“…It is not a modular tool. Finally, for SOTA [24], same as for VAST [23], compiler code it-self is not part of the didactic tool. Both are animation tools for visualize specific parts of the typical compiler process.…”