Dragon book

The dragon book is the nickname of Principles of Compiler Design, a famous textbook about compilers written by Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman. It was published in 1977 and is still revered by computer scientists as the definitive text on the subject. It is affectionately named "The Dragon Book" or "The Green Dragon" because it features a drawing of a knight fighting a green dragon on the cover.

Topics covered in the book include:

• Compiler structure.
• Lexical analysis, including regular expressions and finite automata.
• Syntax analysis, including context-free grammars, LL parsers, bottom-up parsers, and LR parsers.
• Syntax-directed translation.
• Type checking, including type conversions and polymorphism.
• Runtime environment issues, including parameter passing, symbol tables, and register allocation.
• Code generation and intermediate code generation.
• Code optimization.

The second edition of the book, which featured a purple dragon on the cover, included the following additional topics:

• Directed translation.
• New ways of analyzing data flow.
• Parallel machines.
• JIT (just-in-time) compiling.
• Garbage collection

Environment, Programming terms