St.

Mary’s University
Faculty of Informatics
Department of Computer Science

Compiler Design
Chapter One
Compiler Design - Overview

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Compiler Design - Overview
❖ Computers are a balanced mix of software and hardware.

❖ Hardware is just a piece of mechanical device and its functions are being controlled by a software.

❖ Hardware understands instructions in the form of electronic charge, which is the counterpart of
binary language in software programming.

❖ Binary language has only two alphabets, 0 and 1.

❖ To instruct, the hardware codes must be written in binary format, which is simply a series of 1s and
0s.

❖ It would be a difficult and cumbersome task for computer programmers to write such codes, which is
why we have compilers to write such codes.

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1.2 Why uses a Compiler?
❖ Compiler verifies entire program, so there are no syntax or semantic errors

❖ The executable file is optimized by the compiler, so it is executing faster

❖ Allows us to create internal structure in memory

❖ Translate entire program in other language

❖ Link the files into an executable format

❖Helps us to enhance our understanding of language semantics

❖ Helps to handle language performance issues

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1.3 Features of Compilers

❖ Correctness

❖ Speed of compilation

❖ Preserve the correct the meaning of the code

❖ The speed of the target code

❖ Recognize legal and illegal program constructs

❖ Good error reporting/handling

❖ Code debugging help

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1.4 Language Processing System

❖We have learnt that any computer system is made of hardware and software.

❖The hardware understands a language; which humans cannot understand.

❖So, we write programs in high-level language, which is easier for us to understand and
remember.

❖These programs are then fed into a series of tools and OS components to get the desired
code that can be used by the machine. This is known as Language Processing System.

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Cont.…
❖The high-level language is converted into binary language in various phases.

❖A compiler is a program that converts high-level language to assembly language.

❖Similarly, an assembler is a program that converts the assembly language to machine-level

language.

❖Let us first understand how a C program, using C compiler, is executed on a host machine.

❖User writes a program in C language (high-level language).

❖The C compiler, compiles the program and translates it to assembly program (low-level
language).

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Conti…
❖An assembler then translates the assembly program into machine code (object).

❖A linker tool is used to link all the parts of the program together for execution (executable machine
code).

❖A loader loads all of them into memory and then the program is executed.

❖ Before diving straight into the concepts of compilers, we should understand a few other
tools that work closely with compilers.

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 1.4.1 Preprocessor
❖ A preprocessor, generally considered as a part of compiler, is a tool that produces input for compilers.

1.4.2 Compiler and an interpreter

❖ An interpreter, like a compiler, translates high-level language into low-level machine language.

❖ The difference lies in the way they read the source code or input.

❖ A compiler reads the whole source code at once, creates tokens, checks semantics, generates intermediate code,
executes the whole program and may involve many passes.

❖ In contrast, an interpreter reads a statement from the input, converts it to an intermediate code, executes it, then
takes the next statement in sequence.

❖ If an error occurs, an interpreter stops execution and reports it. whereas a compiler reads the whole program
even if it encounters several errors.

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 1.4.3 Assembler
❖ An assembler translates assembly language programs into machine code.

❖ The output of an assembler is called an object file, which contains a combination of machine
instructions as well as the data required to place these instructions in memory.

1.4.4 Linker

❖ Linker is a computer program that links and merges various object files together in order to make an
executable file.

1.4.5 Loader

❖ Loader is a part of operating system and is responsible for loading executable files into
memory and execute them.

❖ It calculates the size of a program (instructions and data) and creates memory space for it.
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1.5 Compiler Design - Architecture
A compiler can broadly be divided into two phases based on the way they compile.

1.5.1 Analysis Phase

❖ Known as the front-end of the compiler, the analysis phase of the compiler reads the source program, divides
it into core parts and then checks for lexical, grammar and syntax errors.

❖ The analysis phase generates an intermediate representation of the source program and symbol table,
which should be fed to the Synthesis phase as input.

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 1.5.2 Synthesis Phase

❖ Known as the back-end of the compiler, the synthesis phase generates the target program with the help of
intermediate source code representation and symbol table.

A compiler can have many phases and passes.

❖ Pass: A pass refers to the traversal of a compiler through the entire program.

❖ Phase: A phase of a compiler is a distinguishable stage, which takes input from the previous stage, processes
and yields output that can be used as input for the next stage.

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1.6 Phases of Compiler

❖ The compilation process is a sequence of various phases.

❖ Each phase takes input from its previous stage, has its own representation of source
program, and feeds its output to the next phase of the compiler.

❖ Let us understand the phases of a compiler.

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Cont…

1.6.1 Lexical Analysis

❖ The first phase of scanner works as a text scanner.
❖ This phase scans the source code as a stream of characters and converts it into
meaningful lexemes.

❖ Lexical analyzer represents these lexemes in the form of tokens as:

<token-name, attribute-value>

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 1.6.2 Syntax Analysis

❖ The next phase is called the syntax analysis or parsing. It takes the token
produced by lexical analysis as input and generates a parse tree (or syntax tree).

❖ In this phase, token arrangements are checked against the source code grammar, i.e.
the parser checks if the expression made by the tokens is syntactically correct.

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 1.6.3 Semantic Analysis
❖ Semantic analysis checks whether the parse tree constructed follows the rules of language.
For example, assignment of values is between compatible data types, and adding string to an
integer.

❖ Also, the semantic analyzer keeps track of identifiers, their types and expressions; whether
identifiers are declared before use or not etc.

❖ The semantic analyzer produces an annotated syntax tree as an output.

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 1.6.4 Intermediate Code Generation

❖ After semantic analysis the compiler generates an intermediate code of the source code
for the target machine.

❖ It represents a program for some abstract machine.

❖ It is in between the high-level language and the machine language.

❖ This intermediate code should be generated in such a way that it makes it easier to be
translated into the target machine code.

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 1.6.5 Code Optimization

❖ The next phase does code optimization of the intermediate code.

❖ Optimization can be assumed as something that removes unnecessary code lines, and arranges the
sequence of statements in order to speed up the program execution without wasting resources (CPU,
memory).

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 1.6.6 Code Generation

❖ In this phase, the code generator takes the optimized representation of the intermediate
code and maps it to the target machine language.

❖ The code generator translates the intermediate code into a sequence of (generally) re-
locatable machine code.

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 1.6.7 Symbol Table

❖ It is a data-structure maintained throughout all the phases of a compiler.

❖ All the identifier's names along with their types are stored here.

❖ The symbol table makes it easier for the compiler to quickly search the identifier
record and retrieve it.

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1.7 Compiler Construction tools

❖ Some commonly used compiler-construction tools. Include:

1. Scanner generators.

2. Parser generators.
3. Syntax-directed translation engines.
4. Automatic code generators.
5. Data-flow analysis engines.
6. Compiler-construction toolkits.

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 1.7.1 Scanner Generators

❖ Scanner generator generates lexical analyzers from a regular expression description of the tokens of
a language.

1.7.2 Parser Generators

❖ Parser generator takes the grammatical description of a programming language and produces a syntax
analyzer.

1.7.3 Syntax-directed Translation Engines

❖ Syntax-directed translation engines produce collections of routines that walk a parse tree and generates
intermediate code.

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Cont.…
1.7.4 Automatic Code Generators

❖ Code-generator takes a collection of rules that define the translation of each operation of
the intermediate language into the machine language for a target machine.

1.7.5 Data-flow Analysis Engines

❖ Data-flow analysis engine gathers the information, that is, the values transmitted from one
part of a program to each of the other parts. Data-flow analysis is a key part of code
optimization.

1.7.6 Compiler Construction Toolkits

❖The toolkits provide integrated set of routines for various phases of compiler.
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1.8 History of Compiler
❖ Important Landmark of Compiler's history are as follows:
❖ The “Compiler" word was first used in the early 1950s by Grace Murray Hopper.

❖ COBOL was the first programming language which was compiled on multiple platforms in 1960

❖ The study of the scanning and parsing issues was pursued(followed) in the 1960s and 1970s to
provide a complete solution

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1.9 Application of Compilers
❖ Compiler design helps full implementation Of High-Level Programming Languages

❖ Support optimization for Computer Architecture Parallelism

❖ Design of New Memory Hierarchies of Machines

❖ Widely used for Translating Programs

❖ Used with other Software Productivity Tools

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Summary
❖ A compiler is a program that converts high-level language to assembly language.

❖ A linker tool is used to link all the parts of the program together for execution.

❖ A loader loads all of them into memory and then the program is executed.

❖ A compiler that runs on machine and produces executable code for another machine is
called a cross-compiler.

❖ A Compiler divided into two parts namely Analysis and Synthesis.

❖ The compilation process is done in various phases.

❖ A parser should be able to detect and report any error in the program.

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 End!

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