Semantic Structures for Efficient Code Generation on a Stack Machine

Since the expression is the fundamental building block of any programming language, its evaluation is an integral part of program compilation and execution. In particular, the evaluation techniques and data structures are determined by the class of expressions acceptable by the language. This paper serves as a framework for expression evaluation on a stack machine by presenting a set of optimized algorithms and internal data structures developed during the implementation of several compilers for the Hewlett-Packard computer systems.