Furrrlo / acse

Lab Exercises for the course "Formal Langauges and Compilers" 2023/2024 @ Polimi

ACSE (Advanced Compiler System for Education)

ACSE is a complete toolchain consisting of a compiler (named ACSE), an assembler, and a simulator (named MACE). It provides a simple but reasonably accurate sandbox for learning how compilers work.

ACSE was provided to students in "Formal Languages and Compilers (FLC)" course at Politecnico di Milano during the lab lessons, in order to be used for the exam.

You can navigate through the different branches of this repository to see the different exercises I solved in order to prepare for the exam.

The main branch is mostly unchanged and is exactly as provided, with the only exception of the additon this small section in the README and the .devcontainer stuff which I use for my dev env.

How to use ACSE

ACSE was tested on the following operating systems:

• Linux (any recent 32 bit or 64 bit distribution should work)
• macOS (any recent version should work)
• Windows (both 32 bit or 64 bit) when built with MinGW under MSYS2, or inside Windows Services for Linux (WSL).

If you are using Linux or macOS, ACSE requires the following programs to be installed:

• a C compiler (for example GCC or clang)
• GNU bison
• GNU flex

If you use Windows, first you must install either the MSYS2 environment or Windows Services for Linux (WSL). Both MSYS2 and Windows Services for Linux (WSL) provide a Linux-like environment inside of Windows.

Once you have installed either MSYS2 or WSL, you can use the following instructions just as if you were using Linux or macOS.

Building ACSE

To build the ACSE compiler toolchain, open a terminal and type:

  make

The built executables will be located in the bin directory.

Testing ACSE

To compile some examples (located in the directory tests) type:

  make tests

Using ACSE

In order to use the compiler/assembler/simulator, first you have to export the directory ./bin in your current PATH as follows:

  export PATH=`pwd`/bin:$PATH

You can compile and run new Lance programs in this way (suppose you have saved a Lance program in myprog.src):

  acse myprog.src myprog.asm
  asm myprog.asm myprog.o
  mace myprog.o

You can invoke acse, asm and mace without setting PATH if you wish. In that case you'll need to specify the path to where they are located.

For example, if the current directory is still the directory where you have invoked make to build ACSE, you'll use the following commands:

  ./bin/acse myprog.src myprog.asm
  ./bin/asm myprog.asm myprog.o
  ./bin/mace myprog.o

Alternatively, you can add a test to the tests directory by following these steps:

1. Create a new directory inside tests. You can choose whatever directory name you wish, as long as it is not test.
2. Move the source code files to be compiled inside the directory you have created. The extension of these files must be .src.
3. Run the command make tests to compile all tests, included the one you have just added.

The make tests command only runs the ACSE compiler and the assembler, you will have to invoke the MACE simulator manually.