Action Transformations in the ACTRESS Compiler Generator

Given the action-semantic description of a source language, Actress generates a compiler. The generated compiler translates its source program first to an action, and then to object code. Thus action notation acts as an intermediate language common to all generated compilers. Transformations of the intermediate action greatly improve the efficiency of the object code. This paper studies these transformations. 1 Introduction Actress [2, 3] is an action-semantics directed compiler generator. That is to say, it accepts a formal description of the syntax and action semantics of a particular programming language, the source language, and from this it automatically generates a compiler that translates the source language to C object code. The generated compiler translates each source program to an action, which we call the program action, and thereafter translates the program action to object code. The program action serves as an intermediate representation of the source program's semantics..