Simple Machine Description Grammars

Abstract

Many recent automatic code generators use descriptions of the target machines instruction set to simplify development of high~qua1ity back ends. This paper describes the machine descriptions that are used with P0, a retargetable peephoie optimizer. These machine descriptions are written in a manner similar to the grammars used to describe the language being compiled. Indeed, they are unique in that conventional parser generators used to process the grammar for the front end can be used to build the back end. These machine descriptions are flexible, easy to write, and produce optimizers that use a small amount of memory. Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR