Winter 2017, B.Tech Semester 6 Compiler Lab, NIT Calicut¶

Total number of students crediting the course: 30.

Duration of the course: One semester (13 weeks). Credit Units: 3

A feedback questionnaire was circulated to all the students who credited the course one week before the end of the semester. The responses are summarized below.

Major stages of the Project (Each Stage subsumes the previous Stages):

• Stage 4: Imperative programs without functions. Data types: variables and arrays of integer/string type.
• Stage 5: Imperative programs with functions and recursion. Data types: variables and arrays of integer/string types.
• Stage 6: Imperative programs with support for user defined types and dynamic memory allocation.
• Stage 8: Object oriented programming support for classes and single inheritance.

Q1. Student Performance: How many stages of the project did you complete?¶

Q2. Time Management: How many hours of work did you put into the project per week on an average to complete up to what you have done?¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

Q3. Effectiveness of road map: What percentage of work could be done without having to refer to material outside the roadmap/documentation of project ?¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

Q4: Contribution to understanding of theory: How much did the lab help to improve your understanding of compiler design theory?¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

Q5: Contribution to Programming skills: How far did this lab contribute to the improvement of your coding / software development skills?¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

Q6. Student background: Was your background sufficient for doing the lab ? If not, in which pre-requisite subjects did you have inadequate prior training.¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

Q7. Learning experience: Which stage gave more useful insights?.¶

All Students

Students who finished stage 5 or above

General Observations¶

1. 87% of students who responded that their programming background was sufficient could complete up to Stage 5 or beyond.
2. 77% of the students who reached Stage 6 went on to complete all the stages up to Stage 8.
3. 87% of the students who completed Stage 5 or beyond noted that 90% or more of the project work can be done only by referring to the project documentation and roadmap.
4. 91% of the students who completed Stage 5 or above noted that every student with average programming skills, willing to put in 5-10 hours of work per week should be able to complete the first five stages of the project within one semester.