This is similar in spirit to this much more detailed series of text files, which is a great introduction for a beginner:<p><a href="http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/" rel="nofollow">http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/</a><p>He spends a bunch of time on parsing, since it isn't Lisp.
That paper is epic. It's actually a tutorial for undergrads on compiler construction, however, Ghuloum does nothing but code generation. From start to finish.
As someone who knows very little about compilers, is there any good place to read up on the very basic terminology and such (what a parser is, what they mean by code generation, and get a rough outline how code goes from language to something the processor can understand) that is on a slightly more abstract level than this paper?
At least as of ~four years ago or so, this is how the compiler construction course was taught at IU, according to one of my co-Ph.D. students who went there. He loved the course and its debuggable-at-each-step architecture.