A practical tool kit for making portable compilers
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Hans van Staveren, Ed G. Keizer, Johan W. Stevenson · Communications of the ACM · 1983
The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is an integrated collection of programs designed to simplify the task of producing portable (cross) compilers and interpreters. For each language to be compiled, a program (called a front end) must be written to translate the source program into a common intermediate code. This intermediate code can be optimized and then either directly interpreted or translated to the assembly language of the desired target machine. The paper describes the various pieces of the tool kit in some detail, as well as discussing the overall strategy.