Object-Oriented Symbol Management in Syntax-Directed Compiler Systems

Each symbol in a source program has a series of attributes that govern the operations performed on it. In this paper, we explore object-oriented techniques for representing the attributes of symbols and translating the operations performed on them. This approach is shown superior in memory and run-time speed to the procedural style traditionally used for writing compilers. We demonstrate object-oriented symbol management in a compiler for an arithmetic subset of C. We have used C++ ⎯ a single-dispatching language ⎯ to implement the same, but we emphasize the need for multiple dispatching to develop programs in a heavily-object-oriented style