jsa@edg1.UU.NET (J. Stephen Adamczyk) (01/15/91)
Edison Design Group is pleased to announce the release of its Fortran compiler front end product. It joins our C front end product announced last year. Information on both products follows. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Edison Design Group is a New Jersey corporation founded in May of 1988. It develops and licenses compiler front ends and does related custom development and consulting. Currently, it offers two products: o A C Front End, which accepts the ANSI C language; it also has a compilation option that provides compatibility with traditional K&R/pcc C, including obscure features and exploitable bugs. o A Fortran Front End, which accepts the ANSI FORTRAN 77 language, the MIL-STD-1753 extensions to that standard, and some other common extensions. These products are aimed at developers of new compilers. Current licensees are chip manufacturers and startups. The two front ends have a similar user interface and a similar internal structure. They do their processing in a single pass over the source program, including integrated preprocessing in the C Front End. (Preprocessing alone -- to a textual output file -- can also be done, as in traditional compilers with a separate preprocessor.) The syntax-analysis technique is recursive descent, modified using operator precedence to speed up the scanning of expressions. The front ends generate a high-level tree-structured in-memory intermediate language. This intermediate language contains full information on declarations, statements, and expressions, all in tree form and all with source-correspondence information that simplifies the generation of symbolic debugging information. The front ends do complete error checking, produce clear error messages (including the position of the error within the source line), and avoid cascading of errors. On the other hand, they try to avoid seeming overly finicky to a knowledgeable programmer. The source code is written in a portable dialect of C. Host and target computer characteristics (e.g., command-line interface, integer sizes, floating-point representation) are carefully separated from the main body of the code so that they can be easily changed for rehosting or retargeting. The front ends can be used as part of a cross-compiler. There is extensive internal debugging and assertion-checking code, which can be included or excluded through conditional compilation options. Licensing is in source form with complete internal documentation. If you are interested in one of our products, we can provide a demonstration copy on your system, presentations on the internal structure of the front end, and the opportunity to examine the source code and documentation. For more information, please contact Steve Adamczyk at (201) 744-2620, by mail at 4 Norman Road, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, or by electronic mail at jsa@edg.com or uunet!edg1!jsa.