Design and organization of a translator for a partial differential equation language
Alfonso F. Cárdenas, Walter J. Karplus · 1970
In recent years a variety of techniques for the design and implementation of translators for problem-oriented programming languages has been developed. A number of these employ a high-level programming language such as FORTRAN as the target language, rather than translating directly into assembly language or machine code. The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate the unique advantages which can be realized by making PL/1 the target language and by utilizing the so-called preprocessor (or compile-time) facilities of PL/1. This approach has been successfully used in the design of a translator for PDEL, a special-purpose language for the solution of the partial differential equations of classical physics. Details regarding the language and its application have been presented in an earlier paper and are, therefore, only briefly summarized in the next section. The overall structure and philosophy of the translator are described in the third section, while more detailed aspects of syntax analysis and code generation are described in the fourth section. In the final section a quantitative evaluation of the translator is presented.