Compilers

Why Study Compilers?

 Compilers enable programming at a high
level language instead of machine
instructions.
 Portability,Modularity, Simplicity, Programmer
Productivity
 Also Efficiency and Performance
Compilers Construction touches
many topics in Computer Science
 Theory
 Finite State Automata, Grammars and Parsing, data-flow
 Algorithms
 Graph manipulation, dynamic programming
 Data structures
 Symbol tables, abstract syntax trees
 Systems
 Allocation and naming, multi-pass systems, compiler construction
Compilers Construction touches
many topics in Computer Science...
 Computer Architecture
 Memory hierarchy, instruction selection, interlocks and latencies
 Security
 Detection of and Protection against vulnerabilities
 Software Engineering
 Software development environments, debugging
 Artificial Intelligence
 Heuristic based search
 How to instruct the computer
• Write a program using a programming language
– High-level Abstract Description

• Microprocessors talk in assembly language

– Low-level Implementation Details

Program
written
in a
Compiler Assembly
Language
Programming Translation
Languages
How to instruct the computer
 Input: High-level programming language
 Output: Low-level assembly instructions

 Compiler does the translation:

 Read and understand the program
 Precisely determine what actions it require
 Figure-out how to faithfully carry-out those
actions
 Instruct the computer to carry out those actions
Input to the Compiler
 Standard imperative language(Java,C,C++)
 State
 Variables,
 Structures,

 Arrays

 Computation
 Expressions (arithmetic, logical, etc.)
 Assignment statements

 Control flow (conditionals, loops)

 Procedures
Output of the Compiler
 State
 Registers
 Memory with Flat Address Space
 Machine code – load/store architecture
 Load, store instructions
 Arithmetic, logical operations on registers
 Branch instructions
Compilers
 A compiler is a program that reads a program in one
language, the source language and translates into an
equivalent program in another language, the target
language.
 The translation process should also report the presence
of errors in the source program.
Source Program→ Compiler→Target Program
↓
Error Messages
 There are two parts of compilation.
 The analysis part breaks up the source program into
constant piece and creates an intermediate
representation of the source program.
 The synthesis part constructs the desired target program
from the intermediate representation.
Phases of Compiler
 The compiler has a number of phases plus symbol table manager and an error
handler.

Input Source Program

↓
Lexical Analyzer
↓
Syntax Analyzer
↓
Symbol Table Manager Semantic Analyzer Error Handler
↓
Intermediate Code Generator
↓
Code Optimizer
↓
Code Generator
↓
Out Target Program
Compilers
 The cousins of the compiler are
1. Preprocessor.
2. Assembler.
3. Loader and Link-editor.

 Lexical analyzer takes the source program as an input

and produces a long string of tokens.
 Syntax Analyzer takes an out of lexical analyzer and
produces a large tree.
 Semantic analyzer takes the output of syntax analyzer
and produces another tree.
 Similarly, intermediate code generator takes a tree as an
input produced by semantic analyzer and produces
intermediate code.