Linear data structures for storage allocation in attribute evaluators

Abstract

Practical and theoretical results have been found concerning the use of global storage allocation for the instances of applied occurrences of an attribute. The practical results focus on the necessary and sufficient conditions to decide at evaluator construction time whether an evaluator can allocate the instances of an applied occurrence to a number of global variables, stackes and queues. Checking these conditions takes polynomial time for a simple multi-visit evaluator and exponential time for an absolutely non-circular evaluator. The theoretical results are concerned with the data structures that are required for the global storage allocation of the instances of applied occurrences in simple multi-X evaluators, where X € {pass, sweep, visit}. For this purpose, the general class of basic linear data structures is introduced. This class of data structures can also be used to explore the theoretical possibilities and limitations of storage allocation techniques in domains other than attribute grammars.