Design of methodology for incremental compiler construction

Abstract

The paper deals with possibilities of the incremental compiler construction. It represents the compiler construction possibilities for languages with a fixed set of lexical units and for languages with a variable set of lexical units, too. The methodology design for the incremental compiler construction is based on the known algorithms for standard compiler construction and derived for both groups of languages. Under the group of languages with a fixed set of lexical units there belong languages, where each lexical unit has its constant meaning, e.g., common programming languages. For this group of languages the paper tries to solve the problem of the incremental semantic analysis, which is based on incremental parsing. In the group of languages with a variable set of lexical units (e.g., professional typographic system TEX), it is possible to change arbitrarily the meaning of each character on the input file at any time during processing. The change takes effect immediately and its validity can be somehow limited or is given by the end of the input. For this group of languages this paper tries to solve the problem case when we use macros temporarily changing the category of arbitrary characters.

Keywords

• parser
• incremental analysis
• compiler
• programming language
• TEX