The analysis and synthesis model of compilation helps bridge the gap between high-level programming languages and machine-level execution, enabling the development of efficient and portable software applications.
Analysis Phase:
The analysis phase focuses on understanding the structure and meaning of the source code, ensuring its correctness and adherence to syntax and semantics.
1. Lexical Analysis: The compiler breaks down the source code into individual tokens, such as keywords, identifiers, operators, and literals. It removes unnecessary elements like white spaces and comments.
2. Syntax Analysis: The compiler verifies the syntax of the code by checking the arrangement of tokens according to the language’s grammar rules. It builds a parse tree or abstract syntax tree (AST) that represents the hierarchical structure of the code.
3. Semantic Analysis: The compiler checks the meaning and context of the code. It ensures that expressions, statements, and declarations adhere to the language’s semantic rules. Type checking and symbol table construction are performed to catch any semantic errors.
Synthesis Phase:
The synthesis phase involves generating more efficient representations of the code, optimizing it, and finally producing the target code that can be executed by the computer.
1. Intermediate Code Generation: The compiler may generate an intermediate representation of the source code, which is often platform-independent and provides a more optimized representation for further processing.
2. Optimization: The compiler applies various optimization techniques to the intermediate code. These optimizations improve the efficiency and performance of the resulting executable. Examples include constant folding, loop unrolling, and dead code elimination.
3. Code Generation: The compiler generates the target code, which can be machine code specific to the target hardware or assembly language closely resembling the machine code. This output code is executable on the target system without the need for further translation.