
diff -r 726cefd6a635 -r 562fcdb1ae89 handouts/ho01.tex
--- a/handouts/ho01.tex	Thu Nov 14 13:50:39 2019 +0000
+++ b/handouts/ho01.tex	Fri Nov 15 14:58:16 2019 +0000
@@ -43,8 +43,35 @@
 
 \section*{Handout 1}
 
+The purpose of a compiler is to transform a program a human can read
+and write into code the machine can run as fast as
+possible. Developping a compiler is an old craft going back to 1952
+with the first compiler written by Grace Hopper.  Why studiying
+compilers nowadays?  An interesting answer is given by John Regher in
+his compiler
+blog:\footnote{\url{http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1419}}
+
+\begin{quote}\it{}``We can start off with a couple of observations
+  about the role of compilers. First, hardware is getting weirder
+  rather than getting clocked faster: almost all processors are
+  multicores and it looks like there is increasing asymmetry in
+  resources across cores. Processors come with vector units, crypto
+  accelerators, bit twiddling instructions, and lots of features to
+  make virtualization and concurrency work. We have DSPs, GPUs,
+  big.little, and Xeon Phi. This is only scratching the
+  surface. Second, we’re getting tired of low-level languages and
+  their associated security disasters, we want to write new code, to
+  whatever extent possible, in safer, higher-level
+  languages. Compilers are caught right in the middle of these
+  opposing trends: one of their main jobs is to help bridge the large
+  and growing gap between increasingly high-level languages and
+  increasingly wacky platforms. It’s effectively a perpetual
+  employment act for solid compiler hackers.''
+\end{quote}  
+
+
 The first part of this module is about text processing, be it for
-web-crawlers, compilers, dictionaries, DNA-data, spam-filters and so on.
+compilers, dictionaries, DNA-data, spam-filters and so on.
 When looking for a particular string, say \pcode{"foobar"}, in a large
 text we can use the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm, which is currently the
 most efficient general string search algorithm. But often we do




