Action Notation Transformations
Hermano Perrelli de Moura · 1993
Actress is a semantics-directed compiler generation system based on action semantics. Its aim is to generate compilers whose performance is closer to hand-written compilers than the ones generated by other semantics-directed compiler generators. Actress generates a compiler for a language based solely on the language's action semantic description. We describe the process by which this is achieved. A compiler for action notation, the formal notation used in action semantic descriptions, is the core of the generated compilers. We specify and implement a code generator for the action notation compiler. We also present the design and implementation of an action notation interpreter. A conventional hand-written compiler eliminates, whenever possible, references to identifiers at compile time. Some storage allocation is often performed at compile-time too. We can see both steps as transformations whose main objective is to improve the quality of the object code. The compiler writer, based o...