The project

Michael's and Laurie's solution is very nice indeed and has received an excellent grade of A-; however, there is room for improvement, which may elevate their grade to an amazing A+. This project focuses on four such improvements.

C-style comments

The A- implementation only allows one-line comments such as:

// this is a comment

I would be nice to additionally allow multi-line comments such as:

/* this is a
   somewhat
   longer comment */

This improvement can be implemented by only making changes to the file joos.l.

Increments and for-loops

It would be very nice to include standard increments and for-loops such as:

for (i=0; i<10; i++) k=k*i;

These construct may be introduced as mere syntactic sugar, since they can readily be expressed in the JOOS language itself. This improvement can be implemented by only making changes to the files joos.l and joos.y.

More peephole patterns

The peephole optimizer provides a very nice framework, but the A- implementation only includes four peephole patterns. Surely, many more can be discovered. This improvement can be implemented by only making changes to the file optimize.c.

Correct stack limits

The weakest point of the A- implementation is the stupid computation of stack limits, which are always assumed to equal 25. It would be much nicer to compute the exact limit. This improvement can be implemented by only making changes to the file emit.c.