ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or (permissions@acm.org). An Evaluation of an Automatically Generated Compiler ANTHONY M. SLOANE James Cook University Compilers or language translators can be generated using a variety of formal specification techniques. Whether generation is worthwhile depends on the effort required to specify the translation task and the quality of the generated compiler. A systematic comparison was conducted between a hand-coded translator for the Icon programming language and one generated by the Eli compiler construction system. A direct comparison could be made since the generated program performs the same translation as the hand-coded program. The results of the comparisonshow that efficient compilers can be generated from specifications that are much small...

This report describes the design and implementation of HASKELL system. The areas implemented are the lexical analysis, parsing, intepretation of the lambda tree, and machine code generation. Because of the size, complexity and novelty of the language many of these areas present particular difficulty. A considarable amount of meta-programming was used in order to tackle the size of the project. Contents Introduction v 1 Lexical Analysis 1 1.1 Technical Overview 1 1.2 General Description 3 1.3 The Layout Rule 4 1.4 Alternative Design 5 1.5 Coding for Speed 6 1.5.1 Token Recognition 7 1.5.2 Character Copying 8 1.5.3 Memory Allocation 9 1.5.4 Symbol Table Updates 9 1.5.5 The Ultimate Combination 9 1.5.6 Performance 10 1.6 Testing 10 2 Parsing 11 2.1 Technical Overview 11 2.2 General Description 12 2.3 Handling the Grammar Ambiguities 13 2.3.1 Definable Operators and Function Applications 13 2.3.2 General 15 2.3.3 September Version 15 2.3.4 April Grammar changes 17 2.3.5 April Version 18 ...