18CSC304J- COMPILER DESIGN

UNIT-4

SRMIST, Vadapalani Campus

 UNIT-IV SYLLABUS
1. Intermediate Code Generation 10. Code Generation
2. Intermediate Languages - prefix - postfix 11. Issues in the design of code generator
3. Quadruple - triple - indirect triples 12. The target machine – Runtime Storage
Representation management
4. Syntax tree- Evaluation of 10. A simple Code generator
expression-three-address code 11. Code Generation Algorithm
5. Synthesized attributes – Inherited 12. Register and Address Descriptors
attributes 13. Generating Code of Assignment Statements
6. Intermediate languages – Declarations 14. Cross Compiler – T diagrams
7. Assignment Statements 15. Issues in Cross compilers
8. Boolean Expressions, Case Statements
9. Back patching – Procedure calls

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SRMIST, Vadapalani Campus
Introduction
Intermediate Code

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SRMIST, Vadapalani Campus
Overview

● Intermediate representations span the gap

between the source and target languages:

○ closer to target language;

○ (more or less) machine independent;

○ allows many optimizations to be done in a

machine-independent way.
● Implementable via syntax directed translation,
so can be folded into the parsing process.
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Types of Intermediate Languages
● High Level Representations (e.g., syntax trees):

○ closer to the source language

○ easy to generate from an input program

○ code optimizations may not be straightforward.

● Low Level Representations (e.g., 3-address code):

○ closer to the target machine;

○ easier for optimizations, final code generation;

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Syntax Trees

A syntax tree shows the structure of a program by abstracting away

irrelevant details from a parse tree.

○ Each node represents a computation to be performed;

○ The children of the node represents what that computation is

performed on.
Syntax trees decouple parsing from subsequent processing.
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Syntax Trees: Example
Parse tree:
Grammar :

E→E+T | T

T→T*F | F

F → ( E ) | id

Syntax tree:

Input: id + id * id

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Intermediate Languages Types
● Graphical IRs: Abstract Syntax trees, DAGs, Control Flow Graphs
● Linear IRs:

○ Stack based (postfix)

○ Three address code (quadruples)

CS 540 GMU Spring 2009 8

Graphical IRs
● Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) – retain essential structure of the parse tree,
eliminating unneeded nodes.
● Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) – compacted AST to avoid duplication –
smaller footprint as well
● Control flow graphs (CFG) – explicitly model control flow

CS 540 GMU Spring 2009 9

ASTs and DAGs: a := b *-c + b*-c

:= :=

a + a +

* * *

b - (uni) b - (uni) b - (uni)

c c c

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