An optimizing compiler for lexically scoped LISP

  • Authors:

  • Rodney A. Brooks;Richard P. Gabriel;Guy L. Steele, Jr.

  • Affiliations:

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts;Stanford University, Stanford, California and Lawrence Livennore National Laboratory, University of California, Livennore California;Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • SIGPLAN '82 Proceedings of the 1982 SIGPLAN symposium on Compiler construction
  • Year:
  • 1982

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Abstract

We are developing an optimizing compiler for a dialect of the LISP language. The current target architecture is the S-I, a multiprocessing supercomputer designed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. While LISP is usually thought of as a language primarily for symbolic processing and list manipulation, this compiler is also intended to compete with the S-1 PASCAL and FORTRAN compilers for quality of compiled numerical code. The S-1 is designed for extremely high-speed signal processing as well as for symbolic computation; it provides primitive operations on vectors of floating-point and complex numbers. The LISP compiler is designed to exploit the architecture heavily. The compiler is structurally and conceptually similar to the BLISS-11 compiler and the compilers produced by PQCC. In particular, the TNBIND technique has been borrowed and extended.