Download ppt - OoCities

COMPILER
CONSTRUCTION
WEEK-3:
INTRODUCTION TO
STATEMENTS AND TYPES:
An Overview
• The facilities provided by Pascal and C are developed
enough that latter languages have simply borrowed them,
and built on them.
• In imperative programming:
• The values of variables can change as a program runs,
and
• Programs – what we write – are not the same as
computations – the actions that occur when a program
runs.
• These motivate the two key concepts: Structure
Statements and invariants (relate programs and
computations).
The need for structured programming:
• The basic unit of imperative programming are actions, which can
change the values of variables.
• A typical action is an assignment.
• The following assignment changes the value of variable a:
• a = 2+3;
or
a := 2+3
• The assignment symbol := or = appears between the variable a and
the expression 2+3.
• This assignment computes the value 5 of the expression 2+3 and
associates it with a; the old value of a is forgotten (in whatever the
case – even if a not assign any value – garbage)
• An Array supports random access to a sequence of elements of the
same type.
• Random access means that elements can be selected by their
position in the sequence.
• Static programs, Dynamic Computations: A program is a concise
representation of the computation that occurs when the program can
be executed over and over again, possibly leading to a long
computation.
The need for structured programming:
• Language designers have achieved efficiency by staying true to the
machine, using the following design principle:
• Efficiency: A language must allow an underlying assignment-oriented
machine to be used directly and efficiently.
• Efficiency is likely to remain a driving influence.
• For example, consider the following problem:
• Remove adjacent duplicated from a list of elements.
• For removal of adjacent duplicates from:
• 112223144
• yields the list:
• 12314
• The remaining occurrences of 1 are not adjacent.
• This problem can be solved by treating the input not as a list of
elements, but as a list of runs, where run consists of one or more
copies of the same element.
• The approach is to repeatedly
– Read element x;
– Write x;
– Skip past the duplicates of x;
Invariants: Program Design:
• Programming language design must deal at some level with program
design.
• The purpose of programming languages is to make programming
easier.
• Invariants are a key concept for designing imperative programs.
• An invariant at some point in a program is an assertion that holds
whenever that point is reached at run time – that is, whenever control
reaches that point.
• An assertion is a true/false condition about the state of a computation.
• Some of the difficulty in writing correct code is that correctness is a
property not of the static source text we write but of its dynamic
computations – when the program is run it must do such and such.
• Technically we work with assertions, yet we talk about invariants, since
the intent is to work with properties that hold every time control
reaches a program point.
Types: Data Representation:
• The emphasis in imperative languages is on data
structures with assign-able components; that is,
components that can hold individual values.
• The size and layout of data structures tends to be fixed at
compile time in imperative languages, before a program is
run.
• Data structures that grow and shrink are typically
implemented using fixed-sized cells and pointers.
• Storage in imperative languages must typically be
allocated and de-allocated explicitly.
• By contrast, in functional languages, the emphasis is on
values, independent of how they are stored; operations of
values implicitly grow and shrink the underlying data
structure; and, storage is recycled automatically, using
garbage collection.
Types: Data Representation:
• Role of Types:
• The term object or data object refers to something
meaningful to an application; the term representation or
data representation refers to the organization of values in
a program.
• Thus, objects in an application have corresponding
representations in a program.
• For example, the objects in this example are days like May
6 and their representations are integers like 126.
• A parking-lot company counts the number of cars that
enter the lot each day.
• A day of the year is a data object in this parking-lot
application.
• In a program, a day can be represented by an integer
between 1 to 366.
• January 1 is represented by 1, January 31 by 31, February
1 by 32, and so on.
• The correspondence between application and program is
as follows:
Types: Data Representation:
Application
Program
Data …
January 31
31
Data …
May 6
126
Variable …
d
n
Operation
tomorrow(d)
n+1
Once days are represented as integers, the integers can be manipulated
using arithmetic operation like = and + on integers.
For example, if d is a day and n is its integer representation, then the next day,
tomorrow(d), is represented by n+1.
Confusion between objects and their representations can lead to errors.
Types: Data Representation:
• It makes sense to multiply two integers, but it does not
make sense to multiply two days.
• Furthermore, the representation may not be unique; the
day May 6 is represented by the integer 126 – or is it 127?
• The answer depends on whether the month of February
has 28 or 29 days that year.
• Data representations in imperative language are built up
from values that can be manipulated directly by the
underlying machine.
• Values held in machine locations can be classified into
basic types, such as integers, characters, reals, and
booleans.
• A type expression describes how a data representation is
built up.
• The term “type expression” will be abbreviated to type to
avoid confusion between a type expression like:
• int abc[10];
or
array [0..99] of char
• and an arithmetic expression like
Basic Types:
• Values associated with basic types can be used freely and efficiently
in imperative languages.
• They can be compared for equality, they can appear on the right sides
of assignments, and they can be passed as parameters.
• Operations on basic values often correspond to single machine
instructions or short sequences of machine instructions, so the
operations are implemented efficiently.
Enumerations:
• An enumeration is a finite sequence of names written between
parentheses.
• The declaration makes day an enumeration with seven elements as:
• type day = (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun);
• Names like Mon are treated as constants.
• Enumerated names are constants.
• The basic type boolean is treated as the pre-declared enumeration:
• type boolean = (true, false);
Basic Types:
• Pointers: Efficiency and Dynamic Allocation:
• A pointer type is a value that provides indirect access to elements of a
known type.
• Pointer are motivated by indirect addresses in machine language, the
main difference being that a pointer p points only to objects of a
specific type T.
• Pointers are used as follows:
• Efficiency: Rather than move or copy a large data structure in memory,
it is more efficient to move or copy a pointer to the data structure.
• Dynamic data: Data Structures that grow and shrink during execution
can be implemented using records and pointers.
• Pointers serve as links between cells.
• String:
• String in C.