Comment by kingaillas

Hey, I know Shriram! We were students at Rice together. Not saying we knew each other well, more like passing acquaintances, but I recognize his name.

Anyway, as I recall from compilers classes (it has been ~30 years), the Dragon book heavily emphasized parsing, but the professor said "I'll assign you a parse to do by hand for homework, but and that's it".

The overall attitude was a combo of 1) parsing theory is also covered in another theory of computation class (where the classic textbook was at the time "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation" by Hopcroft and Ullman, but these days may also be Sipser's book; 2) there were so many other topics to cover in compilers that a week or so of parsing was all the time budget allowed; and 3) the research focus of the professor's work was in other areas, and compiler research in general was the same.

So not enough attention to parsing might be a side effect (perhaps unfortunate). Even if there is enough material to have an entire class on parsing.

I took the advanced course in compilers too, which was more like a topics class - a research paper every week or so. I don't remember anything about parsing there either.