Subroutine interface primitives for ETC
B. N. Dickman · 1971
Efficient coding for subroutine interfaces often implies, especially for system programmers, the passing of arguments in hardware registers, rather than on a system stack. This is a problem in an extendible compiler that allocates registers for itself and also allows programmers to use hardware registers (as well as memory locations) as variables. There is the added problem of standardizing the subroutine interface to reduce the possibility of using the subroutine incorrectly. This abstract discusses a solution to these problems. The compiler for which the solution is intended is ETC[1], an extendible, macro-based, infix compiler designed to facilitate the production of very efficient code. Statements in the language may be freely mixed with machine operations, pseudo-operations, and macro calls. The extended language resembles FORTRAN. The base language consists of an assembler with a powerful macro facility [2] and a set of primitives, including operation, function and attribute definition, and limited register allocation.