A portable compiler: theory and practice

Overview of the amsterdam compiler kit

The tool kit consists of eight components:

• The preprocessor
• The front ends
• The peephole optimizer
• The global optimizer
• The back end
• The target machine optimizer
• The universal assembler/linker • The utility package

The preprocessor

• extend all the program- ming languages by adding certain generally useful facilities to them in a uniform way. One of these is a simple macro system,
• Another useful facility provided by the preprocessor is the ability to include compile-time libraries.
• A third feature of the preprocessor is conditional compila- tion.