An object-oriented and generic compiler generator

Abstract

Object-oriented software development has become the de-facto standard programming paradigm used in modern software systems. Additionally genericity has grown more popular since the enhancement of Java and C#. This paper attempts to reconsider the principles of compiler construction from this modern, object-oriented point of view. We present a multi-paradigm, mainly object-oriented and generic approach for creating a compiler generator using a combination of the Interpreter pattern and the Visitor pattern. A prototype of such an object-oriented and generic compiler generator has also been developed using C# 2.0 and will serve as a reference to explain the design throughout this paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.