FWIW, if you follow the link to his compilers class page, you can see that the projects do in fact deal with traditional topics: Lexical analyzer Parser

FWIW, if you follow the link to his compilers class page, you can see that the projects do in fact deal with traditional topics: Lexical analyzer Parser High-level translator Normalizer & CPS converter Low-level translator Register allocator & Assembly code emitter Anyway, when I took compilers it was similar to yours -- each week we compiled larger subsets of Python to x86.