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Re: "Documentation by paper"
Another possiblity is to have one file that has the definition of
terms, as well as bibliography entries for the papers and books that
the algorithms were derived from. That way if someone(like me who
took his last compiler course twenty years ago using the dragon book)
wanted to learn more about GCC and especially its optimizers, they
could
use the bibliography as a guide to the relavent papers and books.
If you really want to learn the basics, you could always look at slides
from todays compiler construction courses.
I did a quick google search and found at least 5 nice sets of slides
that explain this stuff very well, some with bibliographies at the end
(and some with copies of the papers).
However, a bunch of compiler writers trying to keep an up to date
bibliography of seminal papers in compiler history seems like asking
for trouble.
--Dan