Software engineering paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Software engineering paper - Essay Example expressed portable because the original c compilers lacked the ability to represent the relative sizes of floating-point data and integers in a machine-independent way. The structure of a mobile c compiler design was in such a way that it could be adaptable to other different machines and not only UNIX machines. The architectural structure of the portable compiler was one that could be easily modified. The compiler contained approximately 8000 lines of code that less than 20 percent of it was a machine dependent. The maintenance work of the c compiler code is easy because the structure has a large portion of similar code in many systems like the IBM System/370. In addition Honeywell 6000, Inter-data 8/32, SEL86 or even in eclipse and DEC VAX-11/780. Its structure also consists of an intermediate file found in the interface between the passes of portable c. This file contains representations of expression trees and character illustrations of stereotyped code for epilogues and subroutine prologues. The structural architecture of a portable UNIX was created from the realization that operating systems of many machines had hardware architectures that were a significant problem to the implementation of the UNIX system. The structure was to have a c compiler that could be altered without many problems and create new code for various machines. The c language was to be extended in order to allow many c programs become portable to a larger range of devices and be able to identify constructions that are non-portable. It illustrates the structure of re-coding a language in this case the c language as this would allow detection of machine dependencies and isolate them. It would also enable demonstration of portability by using it in other machines. The portable c compiler had to compromise its optimality with heuristic algorithms so that it could be able to get efficient and acceptable code to be generated in quite reasonable time. The creation of the portable c compiler