Dynamic allocation of space for attribute instances in multi-pass evaluators of attribute grammars

Abstract

Attribute grammars [14] have proved useful as the basis of input languages for compiler-compilers. Many algorithms have evolved which can be used to automatically produce an evaluator for a given attribute grammar. The task of an evaluator is to compute the values of the attribute instances attached to a parse tree. From the compiler point of view, the evaluator takes care of the semantic analysis and in some cases also the code generation of the compiler. An overview of various evaluation algorithms is given in [6]. A bibliography can be found in [21].