Tour through the Praxis compiler

Technical Report · Wed Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 1981

OSTI ID:6104250

Morgan, C R

Praxis is a high level computer language, designed by Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. It is intended for such applications as process control, communications and systems programming. Praxis provides structured programming features, such as strong typing and data encapsulation, while providing expressibility and efficient code. Praxis is a modification of a language designed for the Defense Communications Agency. During that study we proposed a possible compiler implementation which has become the basic design for the Praxis compiler. This report will update that compiler design to reflect the current Praxis compiler. The structure of this report was inspired by C language compiler description. The Praxis compiler is constructed to be easily portable to other source and object machines. It has been designed to provide a straightforward implementation of code generators and compilers for a broad class of machines including register and stack machines. The design isolates most machine dependent portions in the code generator phases of the compiler. In fact most code generator strategy is contained within a set of tables that are generated by a partially machine independent code generator tool. Currently, Praxis compilers exist for the DEC PDP-11 and VAX computers. A Compiler for the DECSystem-20 is being developed.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (USA); Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, MA (USA)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 6104250
• Report Number(s): UCRL-15414; ON: DE82003189
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
COMPUTER CODES
P CODES
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
SPECIFICATIONS