The Production Quality Compiler-Compiler Project (PQCC) was a long-term project led by

William Wulf William Allan Wulf (December 8, 1939 – March 10, 2023) was an American computer scientist notable for his work in programming languages and compilers. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Wulf attended the University of Illinois Urbana ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

to produce an industrial-strength

compiler-compiler In computer science, a compiler-compiler or compiler generator is a programming tool that creates a Parsing#Computer_languages, parser, interpreter (computer software), interpreter, or compiler from some form of formal description of a programm ...

. PQCC would produce full, optimizing

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

s from descriptions of the programming language and the target machine. Though the goal of a fully automatic process was not realized, PQCC technology and ideas were the basis of production compilers from

Intermetrics AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.) was a software company founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969 by several veterans of M.I.T.'s Instrumentation Laboratory who had worked on the software for NASA's Apollo Program including the Apollo ...

Tartan Laboratories Tartan Laboratories, Inc., later renamed Tartan, Inc., was an American software company founded in 1981 and based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that specialized in programming language compilers, especially for the language Ada. It was based on wo ...

, and others.

, ''

The Design of an Optimizing Compiler ''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The ...

'', Elsevier Science Ltd, 1980. . Describes Wulf's BLISS-11 compiler, which included some PQCC ideas.

Objective

The focus of the project was on the

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

and

machine-dependent Machine-dependent software is software that runs only on a specific computer. Applications that run on multiple computer architectures are called machine-independent, or cross-platform. Many organisations opt for such software because they believe ...

phases of compilation, since lexical and

syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...

analysis were already well understood. Each phase was formalized in a manner that permits expression in table-driven form. The automatic construction of the compiler then consists of deriving these tables from the semantic definitions of the language and target machine. Though this approach was largely successful for target machine description, it was less so for semantics.

References

{{reflist Compilers Parsing algorithms Parsing

Objective

See also

References