software engineering project

[shlomo bauer]

HI,

As a former professor teaching software engineering, I was bit
surprised by your posting -- perhaps I misunderstood your intent.

Although software engineering in the large is more about process than
code that's not always the case.  For example, software systems
benefit from code refactoring. An example of refactoring
is finding sequences of code that are repeated in a variety of places
and replacing them with
a function call.

The resulting code has the same "meaning" but a different text -- the
refactored code is easier to understand, etc.

Writing a compiler inandofitself is not a software engineering project.

A good project for you might be to look at a tool like valgrind.
Consider how such tool can be incorporated in the software development
life-cycle.  Having done so, you might then try to
find a taxonomy of defects (NIST in america published) by frequency,
severity, etc.   The
interesting question then is what set of tools would be useful in
helping uncover defects likely
to be encountered by customers as well as ones that are catastrophic.

If you really want to write code.  why not do a comparative study of
perl and haskell for a variety of scripting.  Why these two?  Because
haskell was a big win for perl 6 (I'll leave it to you to find out
why).  from a software engineering perspective, language selection
should be based on something more than, "all our code is in perl."

Shlomo