Microprogrammed primitives for compiler construction

The task of a compiler is to syntactically and semantically analyze the source input and translate these source statements into some object language. Independent of the source and object languages, there exists a number of sub-tasks or primitives which must be performed by all compilers. The existence of these language independent compiler sub-tasks indicates that the Implementation of a compiler could be facilitated if the compiler designer had a predefined collection of primitives, which each perform one sub-task, to use as building blocks. This thesis reports the study and comparison of two implementations of just such a set of compiler primitives. The first implementation, which was used in the production of an ASA Standard FORTRAN IV compiler, was programmed in assembler language and consisted entirely of stored program logic. The second Implementation was microprogrammed . Included in the comparison of the two implementations of the primitives are such factors as coding and debug time, execution speed, core requirements, ROM requirements, development costs, and usefulness in the implementation of compilers for various languages. An attempt is made to demonstrate that the higher development cost for the microprogrammed implementation is more than offset by the decrease in the average processing time per statement of the resultant compiler.Computer Science, Department o