Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

Reading this paper made me wonder about how hard and how different it would had been the compilers course if we had had to implement a compiler that integrated with a web environment. I think that indeed this is a very disruptive approach from the usual compilers course that we see and that it would have brought me a better understanding if not of compilers, since I think our professor covers perfectly all the topics, but of web and web development that has become so common and necessary nowadays.

I also think that professor Ariel is right in that it can be a little bit more appealing to students. In particular, my generation gets more attracted sometimes to web applications and implementations than to local and small projects. On the other side, it would have brought some extra challenges in the processing of the language and the generation of the phases of a compiler, since you have to consider the particular characteristics of a web language, such as scripts or connections.

The implementation that caught my attention the most is the one that uses CGI, since it is an interface that I am not very familiar with. The way it treats requests, by appending the requested file if it indeed was a file or just the output if the request was an executable. I also think that it would be the simplest approach since you can help yourself with the tools available like lex and yacc, which lessens the burden over the student.

An extra consideration that surprised me was the filtering special characters. I don’t think that it is something that a web interpreter or compiler would concern about, since it is something that is left most of the times to programmers to deal with by adding some extra checking in fields and parameters editable by users and inside the code.