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CD Unit 3 BACKPATCHING

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21 views

CD Unit 3 BACKPATCHING

cd unit1

Uploaded by

Ganga
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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BACKPATCHING

• A key problem when generating code for boolean expressions and flow-of-control statements is that of
matching a jump instruction with the target of the jump.
• For example, the translation of the boolean expression B in if (B) S contains a jump, for when B is
false, to the instruction following the code for S.
• In a one-pass translation, B must be translated before S is examined. What then is the target of the goto
that jumps over the code for S?
One-Pass Code Generation Using Backpatching
• Backpatching can be used to generate code for boolean expressions and flow-of-control statements in
one pass. Synthesized attributes truelist and falselist of nonterminal B are used to manage labels in
jumping code for boolean expressions.
• In particular, B. truelist will be a list of jump or conditional jump instructions into which we must
insert the label.
• As code is generated for B, jumps to the true and false exits are left incomplete, with the label field
unfilled. These incomplete jumps are placed on lists pointed to by B.truelist and B.falselist, as
appropriate.
• Similarly, a statement S has a synthesized attribute S.nextlist, denoting a list of jumps to the instruction
immediately following the code for S.
1. makelist(i) creates a new list containing only i, an index into the array of instructions; makelist
returns a pointer to the newly created list.
2. merge(pi,p2) concatenates the lists pointed to by p1 and p2, and returns a pointer to the
concatenated list.
3. backpatch(p,i) inserts i as the target label for each of the instructions on the list pointed to by p.
Backpatching for Boolean Expressions
• We now construct a translation scheme suitable for generating code for boolean expressions
during bottom-up parsing.
• A marker nonterminal M in the gram-mar causes a semantic action to pick up, at appropriate
times, the index of the next instruction to be generated. The grammar is as follows:

CS3501 – COMPILER DESIGN


• Consider semantic action for the production B -> B1 || M B2. If Bx is true, then B is also true,
so the jumps on Bi.truelist become part of B.truelist.
• If Bi is false, however, we must next test B2, so the target for the jumps B>i .falselist must be
the beginning of the code generated for B2.
• This target is obtained using the marker nonterminal M. That nonterminal produces, as a
synthesized attribute M.instr, the index of the next instruction, just before B2 code starts being
generated.
• The variable nextinstr holds the index of the next instruction to follow. This value will be
backpatched onto the Bi.falselist (i.e., each instruction on the list B1.falselist will receive M.instr as its
target label) when we have seen the remainder of the production B ->• B1 || M B2.

CS3501 – COMPILER DESIGN


Flow-of-Control Statements
We now use backpatching to translate flow-of-control statements in one pass. Consider statements generated
by the following grammar:

Here S denotes a statement, L a statement list, A an assignment-statement, and B a boolean expression. Note
that there must be other productions, such as

 The code layout for if-, if-else-, and while-statements is the same as in Section 6.6. We make the tacit
assumption that the code sequence in the instruction array reflects the natural flow from one
instruction to the next.

CS3501 – COMPILER DESIGN

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