Code composition as an implementation language for compilers
James M. Stichnoth, Thomas R. Gross · 1997
Code composition is an effective technique for a compiler to implement complex high-level operations. The developer (i.e., the language designer or compiler writer) provides building blocks consisting of sequences of code written in, e.g., C, that are combined by a composition system to generate the code for such a high-level operation. The composition system can include optimizations not commonly found in compilers; e.g., it can specialize the code sequences based on loop nesting depth or procedure parameters. We describe a composition system, Catacomb, and illustrate its use for mapping array operations onto a parallel system. 1 Introduction Application-specific programming languages capture properties of a particular problem domain. For many such problem domains, it is not necessary to design and implement a completely new language. Instead, a programming language like C or Fortran serves as the base and is augmented by operators or control constructs to capture specific informatio...