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| From: | Louis Krupp <lkrupp@pssw.com> |
| Newsgroups: | comp.compilers |
| Date: | Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:58:34 -0700 |
| Organization: | Compilers Central |
| References: | 09-02-021 |
| Keywords: | assembler, practice |
| Posted-Date: | 11 Feb 2009 17:27:43 EST |
marco.m.petersen@gmail.com wrote:
> Is Assembler Language essential in compiler construction? I've read a
> few e-Books on compiler construction and it always says that knowledge
> of assembly is essential.
>
> I mean, if you wrote a program that converts code from BASIC to C++
> then calls another compiler to do the compilation process, wouldn't
> that be considered as a compiler?
> [You certainly need to understand the target language of your compiler.
> Perhaps they weren't anticipating translators that target high level
> languages. -John]
The Unisys MCP Series architecture is an edge case; it doesn't have an
assembler, and the compilers generate object files. It's a stack-based
architecture with some complex instructions tailored to high-level
languages, mostly ALGOL and COBOL. At least a couple of instructions
are designed to make the operating system faster (e.g., the linked list
lookup used in dynamic memory allocation is implemented by a single
instruction).
Louis
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