Space-Efficient Storage Management in an Attribute Grammar Evaluator

Abstract

A space-efficient strategy for storing attributes during evaluation of an attribute grammar is presented. Attributes are classified as either one-pass or multipass. One-pass attributes are stored on a pushdown stack, and their storage is freed when no longer needed. Examination of extant grammars shows that a vast majority of attributes are indeed one-pass, and therefore the scheme presented can greatly reduce the storage requirements of an attribute grammar evaluator. Several approaches to storage management for multipass attributes are also presented. Data for several grammars are collected and used to show the effectiveness of the proposed storage management scheme. © 1981, ACM. All rights reserved.