Early Programming Books

[ben]

On 2021-06-21 2:35 a.m., Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:

> Code-generation is a whole different can of worms and unlike the
> well-trodden path of parsing, is still not a solved problem in computer
> science. All of the compiler textbooks I've checked, including the infamous
> Dragon book, handwave code generation, introducing the tree-matching
> algorithm which works well for straight-line code on their made-up
> educational CPU architectures, but leaves a lot on the table with real-world
> CPUs. This limitation probably doesn't matter for your CPU.
> 
> It seems that you might want to produce code directly from parsing. This
> shortcut can work if you're producing code for a stack machine such as
> FORTH, but not a register machine (unless you use your registers as a
> stack). A common wheeze on the 6502 is to implement a virtual stack machine
> interpreter, and then the compiler targets that.


> To do code-generation "properly", you need a multi-pass algorithm: parse the
> source into a tree, optionally do tree-to-tree transformations to do type
> checks and/or apply optimisations, and then apply the tree-matching
> algorithm to that to produce machine code. This is all well-described in any
> good compiler textbook.

I want to transformatiom before full parsing expressions, as a text process.
string "a+(b+c)*c" becomes "((b+c)*c)a+".

> Note that except for trivial expressions, you'll need a stack and/or other
> registers to squirrel away intemediate results. Consider "(A*B)-(C*D)": you
> need to save the result of one of the multiplications before doing the other
> and then the subtraction.

  They need to be saved regardless of what machine model you use.

> In the case of the tree-matching algorithm, if your CPU (or rather, the
> model given to the tree-matcher) is too limited to evaluate a given
> expression, it will definitively fail and give you a subtree that it cannot
> match. You then have the "joy" of fixing the model, possibly by adding
> virtual instructions which are really library calls. For a simple CPU, such
> calls might account for most of the generated code, at which point a virtual
> machine becomes a good idea.

   I just need calls for mult,divide and special operations. The limitation
is just memory and variable space compared to a larger machine. 2 
addressing modes, Immediate and indexed keep it simple. The compiled
language I plan to design will be simple, but records of some sort will 
be needed. Char,word and Real is all that you get.



> The book "Writing interactive compilers and interpreters" may be more
> suitable if you're looking for quick hacks to get up and running on a small
> machine, assuming you can lay your hands on a copy.
> 
Were are the books, writing assemblers and loaders?
Ben.