--- a/handouts/ho07.tex	Tue Nov 10 22:27:46 2015 +0000
+++ b/handouts/ho07.tex	Sun Nov 15 21:31:31 2015 +0000
@@ -5,9 +5,22 @@
 
 \begin{document}
 
-\section*{Handout 7 (Compiling)}
+\section*{Handout 7 (Compilation)}
 
+The purpose of a compiler is to transform a program, a human
+can write, into code the machine can run as fast as possible.
+The fastest code would be machine code the CPU can run
+directly, but it is often enough to improve the speed of a
+program by just targeting a virtual machine. This produces not
+the fastest possible code, but code that is fast enough and
+has the advantage that the virtual machine care of things a
+compiler would normally need to take care of (like explicit
+memory management).
 
+We will be generating code for the Java Virtual Machine. This
+is a stack-based virtual machine which will make it easy to
+generate code for arithmetic expressions. Recall
+that our
 
 \end{document}