A Modern Approach to Teaching Computer Translation

—In the Computer Science curriculum, the compilers course is dying. It has been relegated to a "specialized, optional" role in the ACM 2001 curriculum. However, some fundamental topics are covered only in that course, such as syntax analysis, computer translation with applications outside compilation, and language specification mechanisms such as regular expressions. In this paper, we present the outline of a completely reorganized and modernized course on computer translation. The approach resembles a spiral: topics are discussed repeatedly and in increasing depth, accompanied by implementation projects that illustrate them. We abandon the traditional goal of implementing a production compiler, as well as other topics that are too compilation-specific. Applications are discussed in areas such as data mining and software engineering.