Translating programming languages for intermediate codes

Abstract

Many of the important data structures used in a compiler are intermediate representations of the program being compiled. Often these representations take the form of trees, with several node types, each of which has different attributes. Tree representations can be described with grammars, just like programming languages. For each grammar rule, there is one constructor that belongs to the class for its left-hand-side symbol. I simply extend the abstract class with a concrete class for each grammar rule. Each grammar rule has right hand side components that must be represented in the data structures.

Keywords

• compiler
• lexical analysis
• abstract syntax
• intermediate representation
• abstract machine language