DESIGN OF A FRONT-END COMPILER FOR HOPE

Abstract

A front-end compiler for a functional language Hope is presented. It analyze4 a Hope program syntactically and semantically, and reports any error found in the program. It also generates sequence of indirect triples as intermediate representation of the source program. UNIX language development tools Lex and Yaac are used to implement syntax directed translation scheme,which is used as the skeleton of this front-end Hope compiler. Various important features of Hope are incorporated in the implemented front-end compiler, which includes pattern matching, notion of tuples, list constructors and recursive function calls. Being very efficient for system programming tasks, ANSI C is used as the language of implementation for this dissertation work. Dynamic memory allocation is used to manage various global data structures including symbol table.