MAKING A COMPILER EASILY PORTABLE

The authors describe a technique for porting a modern language that makes it possible to port the language quickly and still get fast execution. They relate the practical experience they gained when porting the compiler to different environments. They concentrate on transportation problems of compilers that generate machine code rather than those that generate interpreter code. The authors' approach is based on the definition of a universal operating-system interface that must be implemented on the target machine to install the compiler. They ported the Modula-2/68K compiler, which was developed at their institute and has successfully been installed at external sites. Of the two porting procedures they offered--source-code cross development and object-code transportation--the external sites preferred the latter because it requires less effort. 8 refs.