Information-hiding - a Case Study
Jonathan M. Rosenberg, JL Keedy · Annual Conference on Computers · 1981
This paper presents a case study of a medium-scale software project designed and implemented using the information-hiding principle. The project is a production Pascal compiler for the MONADS project. The aims of the project, including the need for portability between several machines and the ability to reuse parts of the compiler for other languages, are described. The decomposition of the compiler into four main modules (source manager, symbol table manager, syntax/semantics processor and code generator) is discussed and particular reference is made to the use of a high-level intermediate code. An evaluation of the application of information-hiding to this project is made and the advantages described. The paper concludes with a discussion of the suitability of Pascal for implementing information-hiding modules. Several problems are mentioned and Pascal is compared with other high-level languages in terms of facilities provided for implementing independent modules.