Re: [pups] lcc (was: GCC)

than gcc, of systems About 10 years ago I used version 3 something and wrote a code generator for a Transputer-like CPU on a chip that we did. I wrote the author just to clarify, and he said that using their compiler to generate code for our chip was fair use, as long as I wasn't selling their code. I never took a compiler course, but it wasn't that hard to understand what was going on. I didn't have the book either. I considered gcc first, but I never did figure it out. In version three, the front end hands the code generator some trees, and the code generator walks the trees and spits out code. For a limited-stack machine similar to the Transputer, it was easy, except I had to totally redo register allocation. The front end for version 3 was very good. I recall I only had to change two or three things in it. My conclusion is that you have to be a compiler expert to write a code generator for gcc. Any competent programmer could do it for lcc. I think the new version has a code generator generator. Doing an lcc code generator for the PDP-11 is on my "someday" list. One thing that you could to do to make it fit on the PDP-11 is break it up into preprocessor, front-end, and code generator programs. -- Jonathan Engdahl Rockwell Automation Principal Research Engineer 1 Allen-Bradley Drive Advanced Technology Mayfield Heights, OH 44124 http://users.safeaccess.com/engdahl jrengdahl(a)safeaccess.com "The things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal." II Cor. 4:18