http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-...
I highly recommend it, but it's heavy stuff. There are probably simpler guides out there that just cover the basics.
http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/tutor8.txt
The main point for our discussion is last:
> Desire for Generality
> We have been concentrating on the use of a recursive-descent parser to parse a deterministic grammar, i.e., a grammar that is not ambiguous and, therefore, can be parsed with one level of lookahead.
> In practice, these issues turn out to be considerably less important. Modern languages tend to be designed to be easy to parse, anyway. That was a key motivation in the design of Pascal. Sure, there are pathological grammars that you would be hard pressed to write unambiguous BNF for, but in the real world the best answer is probably to avoid those grammars!
Here's a bit more of what he said, heavily snipped:
> Limited RAM Forcing Multiple Passes
> All the early compiler writers had to deal with this issue: Break the compiler up into enough parts so that it will fit in memory. When you have multiple passes, you need to add data structures to support the information that each pass leaves behind for the next. That adds complexity, and ends up driving the design.
> Batch Processing
> In a mainframe compiler as well as many micro compilers, considerable effort is expended on error recovery ... it can consume as much as 30-40% of the compiler and completely drive the design. The idea is to avoid halting on the first error, but rather to keep going at all costs, so that you can tell the programmer about as many errors in the whole program as possible.
> Large Programs
[Basically comes down to "This is 1980s Micro Land. We don't have mmap or virtual memory in general. The simple way is to keep everything in RAM and encourage small subroutines."]
> Emphasis on Efficiency
[This is an interesting point. He says that we have fast enough CPUs that compilers can emit sub-optimal code and it doesn't matter.]
> Limited Instruction Sets
[Eh. I don't agree that limited instruction sets make compilers more complicated. Even in his design, code generation was a rather trivial part of the entire program.]
Main link: