Resolving circularity in attribute grammars with applications to data flow analysis

Abstract

Circular attribute grammars appear in many data flow analysis problems. As one way of making the notion useful, an automatic translation of circular attribute grammars to equivalent non-circular attribute grammars is presented. It is shown that for circular attribute grammars that arise in many data flow analysis problems, the translation does not increase the asymptotic complexity of the semantic equations. Therefore, the translation may be used in conjunction with any evaluator generator to automate the development of efficient data flow analysis algorithms. As a result, the integration of such algorithms with other parts of a compiler becomes easier.