S/SL revisited

  • Authors:

  • Ian H. Carmichael;Stephen Perelgut

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM Canada Laboratory, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3C 1V7;IBM Canada Laboratory, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3C 1V7

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '95 Proceedings of the 1995 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

S/SL is a compiler-writing tool that was designed in the late 70's at the University of Toronto. For a time, it was actively developed and enhanced within the IBM Toronto Lab. Widespread interest in the tool within IBM disappeared in the late 80's, and other tools became more prevalent.In 1991, when we began a new COBOL compiler, ILE COBOL/400 [1], we chose to resurrect the S/SL technology, and have used S/SL as the parsing engine for our new compiler.In this paper, we discuss our experience with this technology and why we chose S/SL over other available tools. We present our high-level compiler architecture which, while traditional, is not traditional for S/SL. We gather together a collection of ideas and practices for the use of S/SL, and draw conclusions about the overall quality of this tool.