Lifetime analysis for attributes (Q1820588)

Reduction of attribute storage is a vital requirement for attribute evaluators. We present a new method for the analysis of lifetime of attribute instances. It is assumed that attribute evaluation is performed by a visit-oriented evaluator. Its evaluation sequence for any input can be described by a context-free grammar derived from the visit-sequences. Conditions on that CFG decide for each attribute whether all its instances can be stored in a single global variable. Furthermore one can decide whether several different attributes can be mapped to a single global variable. Similarly conditions for stack implementation are given. All decisions can be made efficiently at evaluator generation time. Hence the method is well suited for compiler generation.