Designed as a self-study guide, the book describes the real-world tradeoffs encountered in building a production-quality, platform-retargetable compiler. The authors examine the implementation of lcc, a production-quality, research-oriented retargetable compiler, designed at AT&T Bell Laboratories for the ANSI C programming language. The authors' innovative approach-a "literate program" that intermingles the text with the source code-uses a line-by-line explanation of the code to demonstrate how lcc is built.

David R. Hanson is a Software Engineer at Google. Before joining Google in December, 2004, he was a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research from 1997-2004 and Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University from 1986-97. He has been on the faculty at Yale and the University of Arizona, and he was Dept. Head at Arizona from 1981-86. His visiting appointments include the University of Utah, the Institute for Defense Analyses, Adobe Systems, and Digital's System Research Center. He was co-editor of Software--Practice and Experience from 1980-88 and continues to serve on its editorial board, and he is co-editor of the Princeton University Press Series in Computer Science. He has published many journal and conference papers and two books: A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation (with Chris Fraser), which describes lcc, a widely used compiler for Standard C, and C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software. He earned a PhD in Computer Science in 1976 from the University of Arizona.