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# System prepended metadata

title: Let's Build a Compiler - Part 1 | Intro

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# Let's Build a Compiler - Part 1 | Intro

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## Intro


This series of articles is a tutorial on the theory  and practice
of  developing language parsers and compilers.    Before  we  are
finished,  we  will  have  covered  every   aspect   of  compiler
construction, designed a new programming  language,  and  built a
working compiler.

Though I am not a computer scientist by education (my Ph.D. is in
a different  field, Physics), I have been interested in compilers
for many years.  I have  bought  and tried to digest the contents
of virtually every  book  on  the  subject ever written.  I don't
mind  telling you that it was slow going.    Compiler  texts  are
written for Computer  Science  majors, and are tough sledding for
the rest of us.  But over the years a bit of it began to seep in.
What really caused it to jell was when I began  to  branch off on
my own and begin to try things on my own computer.  Now I plan to
share with you what I have  learned.    At the end of this series
you will by no means be  a  computer scientist, nor will you know
all the esoterics of  compiler  theory.    I intend to completely
ignore the more theoretical  aspects  of  the  subject.  What you
_WILL_ know is all  the  practical aspects that one needs to know
to build a working system.

This is a "learn-by-doing" series.  In the course of the series I
will be performing  experiments  on  a  computer.    You  will be
expected to follow along,  repeating  the  experiments that I do,
and  performing  some  on your own.  I will be using Turbo Pascal
4.0 on a PC  clone.   I will periodically insert examples written
in TP.  These will be executable code, which you will be expected
to copy into your own computer and run.  If you don't have a copy
of  Turbo,  you  will be severely limited in how well you will be
able to follow what's going on.  If you don't have a copy, I urge
you to get one.  After  all,  it's an excellent product, good for
many other uses!

Some articles on compilers show you examples, or show you  (as in
the case of Small-C) a finished product, which you can  then copy
and  use without a whole lot of understanding of how it works.  I
hope to do much more  than  that.    I  hope to teach you HOW the
things get done,  so that you can go off on your own and not only
reproduce what I have done, but improve on it.
                              
This is admittedly an ambitious undertaking, and it won't be done
in  one page.  I expect to do it in the course  of  a  number  of
articles.    Each  article will cover a single aspect of compiler
theory,  and  will  pretty  much  stand  alone.   If  all  you're
interested in at a given time is one  aspect,  then  you  need to
look only at that one article.  Each article will be  uploaded as
it  is complete, so you will have to wait for the last one before
you can consider yourself finished.  Please be patient.



The average text on  compiler  theory covers a lot of ground that
we won't be covering here.  The typical sequence is:

 * An introductory chapter describing what a compiler is.

 * A chapter or two on syntax equations, using Backus-Naur Form
   (BNF).

 * A chapter or two on lexical scanning, with emphasis on
   deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata.

 * Several chapters on parsing theory, beginning with top-down
   recursive descent, and ending with LALR parsers.

 * A chapter on intermediate languages, with emphasis on P-code
   and similar reverse polish representations.

 * Many chapters on alternative ways to handle subroutines and
   parameter passing, type declarations, and such.

* A chapter toward the end on code generation, usually for some
   imaginary CPU with a simple instruction set.  Most readers
   (and in fact, most college classes) never make it this far.

 * A final chapter or two on optimization. This chapter often
   goes unread, too.


I'll  be taking a much different approach in  this  series.    To
begin  with,  I  won't dwell long on options.  I'll be giving you
_A_ way that works.  If you want  to  explore  options,  well and
good ...  I  encourage  you  to do so ... but I'll be sticking to
what I know.   I also will skip over most of the theory that puts
people  to  sleep.  Don't get me  wrong:  I  don't  belittle  the
theory, and it's vitally important  when it comes to dealing with
the more tricky  parts  of  a  given  language.  But I believe in
putting first things first.    Here we'll be dealing with the 95%
of compiler techniques that don't need a lot of theory to handle.

I  also  will  discuss only one approach  to  parsing:  top-down,
recursive descent parsing, which is the  _ONLY_  technique that's
at  all   amenable  to  hand-crafting  a  compiler.    The  other
approaches are only useful if you have a tool like YACC, and also
don't care how much memory space the final product uses.
                              
I  also take a page from the work of Ron Cain, the author of  the
original Small C.  Whereas almost all other compiler authors have
historically  used  an  intermediate  language  like  P-code  and
divided  the  compiler  into two parts (a front end that produces
P-code,  and   a  back  end  that  processes  P-code  to  produce
executable   object  code),  Ron  showed  us   that   it   is   a
straightforward  matter  to  make  a  compiler  directly  produce
executable  object  code,  in  the  form  of  assembler  language
statements.  The code will _NOT_ be the world's tightest code ...
producing optimized code is  a  much  more  difficult job. But it
will work, and work reasonably well.  Just so that I  don't leave
you with the impression that our end product will be worthless, I
_DO_ intend to show you how  to  "soup up" the compiler with some
optimization.



Finally, I'll be  using  some  tricks  that I've found to be most
helpful in letting  me  understand what's going on without wading
through a lot of boiler plate.  Chief among these  is  the use of
single-character tokens, with no embedded spaces,  for  the early
design work.  I figure that  if  I  can get a parser to recognize
and deal with I-T-L, I can  get  it  to do the same with IF-THEN-
ELSE.  And I can.  In the second "lesson,"   I'll  show  you just
how easy it  is  to  extend  a  simple parser to handle tokens of
arbitrary length.  As another  trick,  I  completely  ignore file
I/O, figuring that  if  I  can  read source from the keyboard and
output object to the screen, I can also do it from/to disk files.
Experience  has  proven  that  once  a   translator   is  working
correctly, it's a  straightforward  matter to redirect the I/O to
files.    The last trick is that I make no attempt  to  do  error
correction/recovery.   The   programs   we'll  be  building  will
RECOGNIZE errors, and will not CRASH, but they  will  simply stop
on the first error ... just like good ol' Turbo does.  There will
be  other tricks that you'll see as you go. Most of them can't be
found in any compiler textbook, but they work.

A word about style and efficiency.    As  you will see, I tend to
write programs in  _VERY_  small, easily understood pieces.  None
of the procedures we'll  be  working with will be more than about
15-20 lines long.  I'm a fervent devotee  of  the  KISS  (Keep It
Simple, Sidney) school of software development.  I  try  to never
do something tricky or  complex,  when  something simple will do.
Inefficient?  Perhaps, but you'll like the  results.    As  Brian
Kernighan has said,  FIRST  make  it  run, THEN make it run fast.
If, later on,  you want to go back and tighten up the code in one
of  our products, you'll be able to do so, since the code will be
quite understandable. If you  do  so, however, I urge you to wait
until the program is doing everything you want it to.

I  also  have  a  tendency  to  delay  building  a module until I
discover that I need  it.    Trying  to anticipate every possible
future contingency can  drive  you  crazy,  and  you'll generally
guess wrong anyway.    In  this  modern day of screen editors and
fast compilers, I don't hesitate to change a module when I feel I
need a more powerful one.  Until then,  I'll  write  only  what I
need.

One final caveat: One of the principles we'll be sticking to here
is that we don't  fool  around with P-code or imaginary CPUs, but
that we will start out on day one  producing  working, executable
object code, at least in the form of  assembler  language source.
However, you may not  like  my  choice  of assembler language ...
it's 68000 code, which is what works on my system (under SK*DOS).
I  think  you'll  find, though, that the translation to any other
CPU such as the 80x86 will  be  quite obvious, though, so I don't
see  a problem here.  In fact, I hope someone out there who knows
the '86 language better than I do will offer  us  the  equivalent
object code fragments as we need them.


### THE CRADLE

Every program needs some boiler  plate  ...  I/O  routines, error
message routines, etc.   The  programs we develop here will be no
exceptions.    I've  tried to hold  this  stuff  to  an  absolute
minimum, however, so that we  can  concentrate  on  the important
stuff without losing it  among  the  trees.  The code given below
represents about the minimum that we need to  get  anything done.
It consists of some I/O routines, an error-handling routine and a
skeleton, null main program.   I  call  it  our  cradle.    As we
develop other routines, we'll add them to the cradle, and add the
calls to them as we  need to.  Make a copy of the cradle and save
it, because we'll be using it more than once.

There are many different ways to organize the scanning activities
of  a  parser.   In [Unix systems](https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/UNIX), authors tend to  use  getc  and
ungetc.  I've had very good luck with the  approach  shown  here,
which is to use  a  single, global, lookahead character.  Part of
the initialization procedure  (the  only part, so far!) serves to
"prime  the  pump"  by reading the first character from the input
stream.  No other special  techniques are required with Turbo 4.0
... each successive call to  GetChar will read the next character
in the stream.

### Code
```c=
{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Constant Declarations }

const TAB = ^I;

{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Variable Declarations }

var Look: char;              { Lookahead Character }
                              
{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Read New Character From Input Stream }

procedure GetChar;
begin
   Read(Look);
end;

{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Report an Error }

procedure Error(s: string);
begin
   WriteLn;
   WriteLn(^G, 'Error: ', s, '.');
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Report Error and Halt }

procedure Abort(s: string);
begin
   Error(s);
   Halt;
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Report What Was Expected }

procedure Expected(s: string);
begin
   Abort(s + ' Expected');
end;

{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Match a Specific Input Character }

procedure Match(x: char);
begin
   if Look = x then GetChar
   else Expected('''' + x + '''');
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Recognize an Alpha Character }

function IsAlpha(c: char): boolean;
begin
   IsAlpha := upcase(c) in ['A'..'Z'];
end;
                              

{--------------------------------------------------------------}

{ Recognize a Decimal Digit }

function IsDigit(c: char): boolean;
begin
   IsDigit := c in ['0'..'9'];
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Get an Identifier }

function GetName: char;
begin
   if not IsAlpha(Look) then Expected('Name');
   GetName := UpCase(Look);
   GetChar;
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Get a Number }

function GetNum: char;
begin
   if not IsDigit(Look) then Expected('Integer');
   GetNum := Look;
   GetChar;
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Output a String with Tab }

procedure Emit(s: string);
begin
   Write(TAB, s);
end;




{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Output a String with Tab and CRLF }

procedure EmitLn(s: string);
begin
   Emit(s);
   WriteLn;
end;

{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Initialize }

procedure Init;
begin
   GetChar;
end;


{--------------------------------------------------------------}
{ Main Program }

begin
   Init;
end.
{--------------------------------------------------------------}
```

That's it for this introduction.  Copy the code above into TP and
compile it.  Make sure that it compiles and runs  correctly. Then
proceed to the first lesson, which is on expression parsing.
