Title: Development of Web-based Visual Compiler for Computer Literacy

Year of Publication: Dec - 2020
Page Numbers: 23-30
Authors: Hiroaki Hiranishi, Primoz Podrzaj, Yoshiro Imai, Tetsuo Hattori
Conference Name: The Sixth International Conference on Electronics and Software Science (ICESS2020)
- Japan

Abstract:


This paper proposes an educational tool, which can visualize the internal processing of the compiler. One of the purposes of this tool is to promote understanding of language processing and behavior of compiler from high-level programming language such as C into machine language (in our case, pseudo assembly language). This tool can run on major browsers of various operating systems because it is implemented in HTML5 and JavaScript. The internal structure is composed of the following four parts: input part for high-level programming language codes, lexical analyzing part, syntax analyzing part, and code generating part. With this visual compiler, we propose a model of computer literacy, which consists of 1) how to compile highlevel language into related assembly code graphically, and 2) how to execute each assembly instruction by CPU simulator. We have demonstrated example lecture of computer literacy with our compiler and carried out questionnaire about lecture with compiler. And we report tentative results of questionnaire about our compiler.