Compiler Construction Tools

A compiler translates and/or compiles a program written in a suitable source language into an equivalent target language through a number of stages. Starting with recognition of token through target code generation provide a basis for communication interface between a user and a processor in significant amount of time. A new approach GLAP model for design and time complexity analysis of lexical analyzer is proposed in this paper. In the model different steps of tokenizer (generation of tokens) through lexemes, and better input system implementation have been introduced. Disk access and state machine driven Lex are also reflected in the model towards its complete utility. The model also introduces generation of parser. Implementation of symbol table and its interface using stack is another innovation of the model in acceptance with both theoretically and in implementation widely. The course is suitable for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Auxiliary tools, such as generators and interpreters, often hinder the learning: students have to fight tool idiosyncrasies, mysterious errors, and other poorly educative issues. We introduce a set of tools especially designed or improved for compiler construction educative projects in C.We also provide suggestions about new approaches to compiler Construction. We draw guidelines from our experience to make tools suitable for education purposes. The final result of this paper is to provide a general knowledge about compiler design and implementation and to serve as a springboard to more advanced courses.

2014

This paper enlightens the structure of compiler, various phases and tools used for its construction.

2011

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

2007

IEEE Transactions on Education, 2003

Compiler construction is a well developed discipline since there is a long tradition of producing compilers supported by practical underlying theory and a large selection of textbooks.

Communications of the ACM, 1992

The School of Niklaus Wirth the Art of Simplicity, 2000

Niklaus Wirth is not only a master of language design but also a pioneer of compiler construction. For four decades he has refined his techniques for building simple, efficient and reliable compilers. This paper tries to collect some general principles behind his work. It is not a paper about new compilation techniques but a reflection about Wirth's way to write compilers.

Preface Vision Compiler construction brings together techniques from disparate parts of Computer Science. The compiler deals with many big-picture issues. At its simplest, a compiler is just a computer program that takes as input one potentially exe-cutable program and produces as output another, related, potentially executable program. As part of this translation, the compiler must perform syntax analysis to determine if the input program is valid. To map that input program onto the finite resources of a target computer, the compiler must manipulate several distinct name spaces, allocate several different kinds of resources, and synchronize the behavior of different run-time components. For the output program to have reasonable performance, it must manage hardware latencies in functional units, predict the flow of execution and the demand for memory, and reason about the independence and dependence of different machine-level operations in the program. Open up a compiler and you are likely to find greedy heuristic searches that explore large solution spaces, finite automata that recognize words in the input, fixed-point algorithms that help reason about program behavior, simple theorem provers and algebraic simplifiers that try to predict the values of expressions, pattern-matchers for both strings and trees that match abstract computations to machine-level operations, solvers for diophantine equations and Pressburger arithmetic used to analyze array subscripts, and techniques such as hash tables, graph algorithms, and sparse set implementations used in myriad applications, The lore of compiler construction includes both amazing success stories about the application of theory to practice and humbling stories about the limits of what we can do. On the success side, modern scanners are built by applying the theory of regular languages to automatic construction of recognizers. Lr parsers use the same techniques to perform the handle-recognition that drives a shift-reduce parser. Data-flow analysis (and its cousins) apply lattice theory to the analysis of programs in ways that are both useful and clever. Some of the problems that a compiler faces are truly hard; many clever approximations and heuristics have been developed to attack these problems. On the other side, we have discovered that some of the problems that compilers must solve are quite hard. For example, the back end of a compiler for a modern superscalar machine must approximate the solution to two or more iii