Computer Engineering 259:
Semantic Analysis Help and Resources

• The key to finishing this assignment is to think and act bottom-up, rather than top-down. If you start trying to implement the semantic rules without any infrastructure, you're doomed to failure. A sequence of possible steps might be:
  1. Design the classes for your symbols. Think about what kind of information needs to be remembered by a compiler and you'll be thinking about what your symbols should be. Then, think about the relationships among the symbols.

  2. If you are working in C, create a struct for each class and start with the leaf classes, working your way toward the root. Place your implementation in separate files such as symbol.h and symbol.c and test them thoroughly.

  3. Create all the predefined symbols to test your implementation. Create global pointers to the predefined symbols so they are always handy and you don't have to look them up each time.

  4. Design and implement common functions on symbols such as creation and abstractions such as base and derives for types. You can use my sample symbol implementation in C as a starting point.

  5. Design your symbol table mechanism and test it thoroughly. Insert all of the predefined symbols into your symbol table.

  6. Think about the types of the attributes that you will need for each rule. In most cases, a pointer to a symbol will suffice.

  7. Start implementing the simplest semantic actions (those in single brackets) first. Make sure that they work before moving onto the more complex actions. Again, think bottom up: you can't write the semantic actions for variables before you have the actions for types written.

• A compendium of the examples presented in class is also available.

• Example programs and possible outputs:
  1. program and output
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• Test cases and expected outputs:
  1. program and output
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