Traditional approaches to semester-long projects in compiler courses force students to implement the early stages of a compiler in depth; since many students fall behind, they have little opportunity to implement the back end. Consequently, students have a deep knowledge of early material and no knowledge of latter material. We propose an approach based on incremental development and test-driven development; this approach solves the emphasis problem, provides experience with useful tools, and allows for such a course to be taught in a three or four weeks.

The next version of the Java language (Software Development Kit 1.5) will include generics, an enhanced for loop, boxing and unboxing of primitive types, typesafe enumerated types, static import, variable arguments, and metadata. This new version is a significant change of the language itself, adding many features that will impact the use of Java in computer science curricula. Fortunately, this new version provides several features that instructors have wanted in the language from its beginning.

Quadtree matrices using Morton-order storage provide natural blocking on every level of a memory hierarchy. Writing the natural recursive algorithms to take advantage of this blocking results in code that honors the memory hierarchy without the need for transforming the code. Furthermore, the divide-and-conquer algorithm breaks problems down into independent computations. These independent computations can be dispatched in parallel for straightforward parallel processing.Proof-of-concept is given by an algorithm for QR factorization based on Givens rotations for quadtree matrices in Morton-order storage. The algorithms deliver positive results, competing with and even beating the LAPACK equivalent.

Object-centered design (OCD) is a methodology developed to help novice C++ programmers learn to design software. By adapting OCD for use with Java, we can reduce the number of phases in OCD from five to three, and introduce object-oriented design (OOD) in CS-1 instead of CS-2.

The uniform representation of 2-dimensional arrays serially in Morton order (or {\eee} order) supports both their iterative scan with cartesian indices and their divide-and-conquer manipulation as quaternary trees. This data structure is important because it relaxes serious problems of locality and latency, and the tree helps to schedule multi-processing. Results here show how it facilitates algorithms that avoid cache misses and page faults at all levels in hierarchical memory, independently of a specific runtime environment.

An elementary, machine-independent, recursive algorithm for matrix multiplication C+=A*B provides implicit blocking at every level of the memory hierarchy and tests out faster than classically optimrd code, tracking hand-coded BLAS3 routines. Proof of concept is demonstrated by racing the in-place algorithm against manufacturer's hand-tuned BLAS3 routines; it can win.The recursive code bifurcates naturally at the top level into independent block-oriented processes, that each writes to a disjoint and contiguous region of memory. Experience has shown that the indexing vastly improves the patterns of memory access at all levels of the memory hierarchy, independently of the sizes of caches or pages and without ad hoc programming. It also exposed a weakness in SGI's C compilers that merrily unroll loops for the super-scalar R8000 processor, but do not analogously unfold the base cases of the most elementary recursions. Such deficiencies might deter future programmers from using this rich class of recursive algorithms.