bradbowes / tiger

Tiger compiler written in Free Pascal

Tiger compiler

• compiler for Andrew Appel's Tiger language with a few tweaks.
• written in Free Pascal.
• compiles to inefficient assembly language for Mac OS X86_64.
• hand written recursive descent lexer and parser.

Differences from the Tiger book

• mod (integer division remainder) operator.
• & operator (logical and) changed to and.
• | operator (logical or) changed to or.
• boolean data type. Relational operators return booleans, true and false are keyword literals.
• char data type. Char literals are # followed by a single letter in quotation marks. eg #"a" or escape sequences #"\n".
• file data type (C FILE* pointer)
• sequences are enclosed in begin and end instead of parentheses.
• semicolon separators are optional between expressions in sequences.
• variable declarations: var keyword not used, format is <id>[: <type>] = <exp> (uses = instead of :=).
• function declarations: function keyword not used, format is <id>([<id>: <type> {, <id>: <type>}]) = <exp>.
• strings can include line breaks and span multiple lines.
• no nested comments
• type aliases are not implemented.
• break is not implemented.
• string comparison operators (<, <=, >, >=) not implemented -- use string_compare function instead.

To do

• array bounds checking
• tail call optimization
• anonymous functions, first class functions
• closures
• enum
• array literals
• garbage collector
• polymorphic types and functions
• modules
• optimization
• ffi
• unicode

Standard Library

IO

Constants

• STD_INPUT
• STD_OUTPUT
• STD_ERROR
• EOF

Functions

• open_input(path: string): file
• open_output(path: string): file
• close_file(f: file)
• getchar(): char
• putchar(c: char)
• file_getchar(f: file): char
• file_putchar(c: char, f: file)
• write(s: string)
• writeln(s: string)
• file_write(s: string, f: file)
• file_writeln(s: string, f: file)
• command_argcount(): int
• command_arg(n: int): string

Conversion

• str(i: int): string (converts int to string)
• num(s: string): int (converts string to int) (todo)
• ord(ch: char): int
• chr(n: int): char

Strings

• length(s: string): int
• substring(s: string, start: int, len: int): string
• string_concat(s1: string, s2: string): string
• string_compare(s1: string, s2: string): int
• string_buffer(size: int): string