Parallel Attribute Grammar Evaluation

Experiments with parallel compilation of programming languages are reported. In order to take advantage of the potential parallelism, the language translation process is expressed as an attribute grammar evaluation problem. Three primary benefits to using attribute grammars are noted. The efficiency and the potential for parallelism of various attribute grammar evaluation methods are studied, and the design of a combined evaluator, which seeks to combine the potential for concurrency of dynamic evaluators and the (sequential) efficiency of static evaluators, is outlined. The methods were used to generate a parallel compiler for a large Pascal subset.