Writing a Compiler in C++

Franck Binard:
Software Correctness and Safety Laboratory

In this article, a simple generic compiler is specified. A generic compiler is a compiler which outputs source code for a set of programming languages rather than just for a particular one. Each language is specified by a grammar.

Our compiler will operate in 4 phases:

• Lexical Analysis Handles of the input stream and produces the tokens of the stream.
• Parsing (in this case top-down, recursive descent parsing) Handles the tokens and produces a parse tree from them.
• Syntax Analysis
• Semantics Analysis
• Code Generation

With the objectof of keeping this article short, the GenericCompiler will be not do any error recovery or code optimisation.

We define the package GenericCompiler like this:

All class diagrams, use cases can also be found here (visio format).