>software stuff wasn't that bad - only studied four languages that I never
>(well, seldom) used after graduation.  Perhaps ironically, one of the most
>fundamentally useful classes from school in terms of understanding things
>was the compiler class I ended up flunking - never wrote the toy compiler
>they wanted as a final project, but some of that parsing logic is
>fundamental across a wide range of applications.

Me too.  While I haven't written a true compiler in years, the lex, FSA,
and other things which were part of those classes are what I still use on a
daily basis.  Having a good variety of languages has helped as well - I
borrow the features I need from each for the current project.

I did the "toy compiler" several times for the class - I had the first one
running 2 weeks into class.  I did it as a non-tokenizing interpreter (ie,
TRS-80 Level I BASIC), a tokenizing p-code compiler (for the floating point
version it was easier to define a machine which directly supported floats),
and an assembly-output compiler (writing Z-80 code, of course).  I did them
all in Pascal on the VAX and TRS-80 and PC.  The hardest part of the
project was writing Pascal source that would compile under three different
environments.

Andy

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