Work Note 7, DM546, Spring 2017

Lecture February 21

• Liveness analysis and register allocation.

Supplementary literature: A note on lattices and fixed points (not part of the curriculum).

Exercises March 1

• Consider code generation templates for the following constructions:
  • for-loops (old Algol/Pascal style): for i:=7 to 42 do SOMETHING.
  • for-loops (C style).
  • loops with break/continue. The loop is as a starting point infinite and starts with the keyword loop without any condition. Inside the body of the loop, break exits the loop and continue starts from the beginning. For both break and continue, this is independent of where in the loop code you are.
  • switch (C) and classic case constructions. The difference is that 'switch' allows for general expressions, whereas 'case' is like 'switch', except that the expression must be a variable name and the variable must be of a type with finite domain, such as char, an enumeration such as 0..99, etc.
  • records.
  • arrays.
  • multi-dimensionel arrays; this is different from arrays of arrays. You must find a layout such that you can efficiently compute the address of A[i,j,k], for instance. Thus, it must be different from following three pointers as you would logically do if you used A[i][j][k].
  • conditional expressions in C style: ( exp ? exp : exp ).
• What is the semantics of i:= 7; for i:=i+1 to i+2 do {i:=i+3; print i} according to your template above, i.e., what is printed? What are the reasonable behaviors?
• What should be the behavior of the following three pieces of C-code:
  • x = 3; r = x++ * x++ * x++;
  • x = 3; r = ++x * ++x * ++x;
  • y = 0; r = y++ + 2*y++ + 3*y++ + 4*y++;
  Try it! You might be surprised...
• Are there efficiency reasons to restrict switch/case expressions to be simple types and only use values from a small domain?
• Some programming languages offer lists with random access (A[i]), append (A.append(42)), and insert (A.insert(pos,val)) which inserts val in between the positions pos and pos+1. Can this be implemented efficiently?