An Effective Approach to Compiler Construction Based on Attribute Grammars and Reusable Components

Abstract

There are two general approaches to software reuse: compositional and generative. Compositional techniques for compiler construction have less been explored, because most compiler parts were thought to be language dependent and hard to reuse. After years of development, however, applying attribute grammars (AGs) to construction of production-quality compilers has not been successful. One major reason is that traditional AG specification methods are too primitive for real specification tasks. This paper presents an approach that integrates both generative and compositional techniques for compiler construction. The approach uses AGs as the compiler backbone and employs reusable components in AG specifications. By extending AGs to incorporate modularity, remote access, collective computing, and object-oriented views on tree nodes, compiler specifications can be more modular and concise. By employing reusable components to handle circular dependency and non-tree structures, specification difficulties due to the theoretical limitations of AGs can be easily removed. The effectiveness and efficiency of this approach are addressed.