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A comment on To become a good C programmer (2011). Parent comment

Re:To become a good C programmer (2011) by genop on Monday May 02, 2016 @10:49PM (#11617488)
That's because it is a compiler.

No. 1 is a program that accepts input (e.g., RTL, MINIMAL, etc.) and generates asm.

I like to call this an asm code generator. Because today when people say "compiler" they are often referring to a collection of programs, some of which do not generate asm.

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Re:To become a good C programmer (2011) by umanwizard on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @10:19AM (#11620889)
I see. So you are excluding the preprocessor, linker, type-checker (for some languages this is a separate program), assembler, etc.?
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Re:To become a good C programmer (2011) by genop on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @12:00AM (#11626078)
Yeah. I'm sorry about the terminology. I guess I just like the term "code generator".

When I use that term I envision simple filters that take ASCII input, maybe even some sort of "template", and transform it into some other format that's useful. Ideally, asm. But not always.

For example, in GCC, for x86, there's a couple of programs that operate on i386-opc.tbl and i386-reg.tbl. I would not call them "code generators" but I suspect they are needed in order for "gcc -s" to work.

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