C++ TRANSLATOR - ISSUES AND AN IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

C++ provides a platform to support the Object-Oriented programming paradigm,having additional constructs beyond C. Source to source translator converts the C++ code into C,and thus facilitates a quick transfer to any platform containing a C-compiler. This project is an implementation of the key object oriented features of C++ for a source-source translator.The implementation is clearly separated in to parsing,semantic analysis and code-generation phases.The Abstract Syntax tree is used as the Intermediate Representation in order to exploit extensive restructuring of the source program repre-sentation.This makes translations for the scope rules of C++ ( nested classes,local classes,local type names ) straight forward.Symbol table management layer implements the seman-tics of access and visibility control,abstract classes. Consistent encoding of overloaded function names relegate the issue of type safe linkage to the linker. Other issues concerning the implementation of translations for Classes,Overloading,Polymorphism,Exception handling and managing C++ Libraries are discussed.The implementation was on a SUN workstation