Design, development and implementation of a simple program compiler: strata

Abstract

The objective of this work is to design a prototype compiler that would translate the sequences of a symbol written in a chosen language. This compiler would translate the sequences of the source language of the system into the object language of the same system. The work showed the procedure of achieving understanding of man’s readable text file and computer’s 1’s and 0’s language. The method adopted included sentence analysis, which involved the recognition of sentences and sentence structures; construction of Syntax graphs, which reflect the flow of control during the process of parsing a sentence and its corresponding parser, which reads the text into an internal, more abstract representation. A simple compiler capable of processing sequences in the chosen language was derived as the result. This compiler has error recovery routine capabilities, which made it recover from errors encountered during compilation, record the error and its location and then continued with compilation. This process was repeated as many times as the compiler encountered an error until the completion of program compilation. The result of this outcome is enhanced runtime speed since the location and the errors had been identified and recorded.

Keyword: Program compiler, object language, syntax graphs, strata

International Journal of Natural and Applied Sciences, 6(4): 391 - 401, 2010