1.

Explain language processing activities with suitable diagrams

Answer Language Processing Activities The fundamental language processing activities can be divided into those that bridge the specification gap and those that bridge the execution gap. We name these activities as: Program Generation Activities Program Execution Activities A program generation activity aims at automatic generation of a program. The source language is a specification language of an application domain and the target language is typically a procedure oriented PL. A program execution activity, organizes this execution of a program written in a PL on a computer system. Its source language could be a procedure-oriented language or a problem oriented language. Program Generation Depicts the program generation activity. The program generator is a software system which accepts the specification of a program to be generated, and generates a program in the target PL. In effect, the program generator introduces a new domain between the application and PL domains. We call this the program generator domain. The specification gap is now the gap between the application domain and the program generator domain. This gap is smaller than the gap between the application domain and the target PL domain.

Program Generation Reduction in the specification gap increases the reliability of the generated program. Since the generator domain is close to the application domain, it is easy for the designer or programmer to write the specification of the program to be generated.

Program generator domain The harder task of bridging the gap to the PL domain is performed by the generator. This arrangement also reduces the testing effort. Proving the correctness of the program generator amounts to proving the correctness of the transformation of this would be performed while implementing the generator. To test an application generated by using the generator, it is necessary to only verify the

correctness of the specification input to the program generator. This is a much simpler task than verifying correctness of the generated program. This task can be further simplified by providing a good diagnostic (i.e. error indication) capability in the program generator, which would detect inconsistencies in the specification. It is more economical to develop a program generator than to develop a problem-oriented language. This is because a problem oriented language suffers a very large execution gap between the PL domain and the execution domain, whereas the program generator has a smaller semantic gap to the target PL domain, j which is the domain of a standard procedure oriented language. The execution gap between the target PL domain and the execution domain is bridged by the compiler or interpreter for the PL. Program Execution Two popular models for program execution are Translation Interpretation

Program Translation Program translation model bridges the execution gap by translating a program written in a PL, called the source program (SP), into an equivalent program in the machine or assembly language of the computer system, called the target program (TP). Characteristics of the program translation model are A program must be translated before it can be executed. The translated program may be saved in a file. The saved program may be executed repeatedly. A program must be retranslated following modifications. Program Interpretation The interpreter reads the source program and stores it in its memory. During interpretation it takes a source statement, determines its meaning and performs actions which implement it. This includes computational and input-output actions. The interpretation cycle, consists of the following steps: 1. Fetch the statement. 2. Analyze the statement and determine its meaning, viz. the computation to be performed and its operands. 3. Execute the meaning of the statement. From this analogy, we can identify the following characteristics of interpretation The source program is retained in the source form itself, i.e. no target program form exists. A statement is analyzed during its interpretation.

2. Draw the flowchart for Pass 1 assembler and explain it. Answer
Flowchart for Pass 1 assembler: The primary function performed by the analysis phase is the building of the symbol table. For this purpose it must determine the addresses with which the symbol names used in a program are associated. It is possible to determine some address directly, e.g. the address of the first instruction in the program, however others must be inferred. To implement memory allocation a data structure called location counter (LC) is introduced. The location counter is always made to contain the address of the next memory word in the target program. It is initialized to the constant. Whenever the analysis phase sees a label in an assembly statement, it enters the label and the contents of LC in a new entry of the symbol table. It then finds the number of memory words required by the assembly statement and updates; the LC contents. This ensure: that LC points to the next memory word in the target program even when machine instructions have different lengths and DS/DC statements reserve different amounts of memory. To update the contents of LC, analysis phase needs to know lengths of different instructions. This information simply depends on the assembly language hence the mnemonics table can be extended to include this information in a new field called length. We refer to the processing involved in maintaining the location counter as LC processing.

3. What is MASM? Explain its features Answer

MASM: Microsoft Macro Assembler The Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) is an assembler for the x86 family of microprocessors, originally produced Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It supported a wide variety of macro facilities and structured programming idioms, including high-level constructions for looping, procedure calls and alternation (therefore, MASM is an example of a high-level assembler). Later versions added the capability of producing programs for the Windows operating systems that were released to follow on from MS-DOS. MASM is one of the few Microsoft development tools for which there was no separate 16-bit and 32-bit version. Assembler affords the programmer looking for additional performance a three pronged approach to performance based solutions. MASM can build very small high performance executable files that are well suited where size and speed matter. When additional performance is required for other languages, MASM can enhance the performance of these languages with small fast and powerful dynamic link libraries. For programmers who work in Microsoft Visual C/C++, MASM builds modules and libraries that are in the same format so the C/C++ programmer can build modules or libraries in MASM and directly link them into their own C/C++ programs. This allows the C/C++ programmer to target critical areas of their code in a very efficient and convenient manner, graphics manipulation, games, very high speed data manipulation and processing, parsing at speeds that most programmers have never seen, encryption, compression and any other form of information processing that is processor intensive. MASM32 has been designed to be familiar to programmers who have already written API based code in Windows. The invoke syntax of MASM allows functions to be called in much the same way as they are called in a high level compiler. The traditional Notation for calling a function is as follows, push par4 push par3 push par2 push par1 call Function Name mov retval, eax.

4. Explain the significance of Lexical analysis and Syntax analysis. Answer

Lexical Analysis The lexical analyzer is the interface between the source program and the compiler. The lexical analyzer reads the source program one character at a time, carving the source program into a sequence of atomic units called tokens. Each token represents a sequence of characters that can be treated as a single logical entity. Identifiers, keywords, constants, operators, and punctuation symbols such as commas and parentheses are typical tokens. There are two kinds of token: specific strings such as IF or a semicolon, and classes of strings such as identifiers, constants, or labels. The lexical analyzer and the following phase, the syntax analyzer are often grouped together into the same pass. In that pass, the lexical analyzer operates either under the control of the parser or a co-routine with the parser. The parser asks the lexical analyzer returns to the parser a code for the token that it found. In the case that the token is an identifier or another token with a value, the value is also passed to the parser. The usual method of providing this information is for the lexical analyzer to call a bookkeeping routine which installs the actual value in the symbol table if it is not already there. The lexical analyzer then passes the two components of the token to the parser. The first is a code for the token type (identifier), and the second is the value, a pointer to the place in the symbol table reserved for the specific value found. Syntax Analysis The parser has two functions. It checks that the tokens appearing in its input, which is the output of the lexical analyzer, occur in patterns that are permitted by the specification for the source language. It also imposes on the tokens a tree-like structure that is used by the subsequent phases of the compiler. The second aspect of syntax analysis is to make explicit the hierarchical structure of the incoming token stream by identifying which parts of the token stream should be grouped together.

5. What are macros and macro processors? Explain in brief. Answer

Macro is similar to a subroutine (or a procedure), but there are important differences between them. A subroutine is a section of the program that is written once, and can be used many times by simply calling it from any point in the program. Similarly, a macro is a section of code that the programmer writes (defines) once, and then can use many times. The main difference between a subroutine and a macro is that the former is stored in memory once (just one copy), whereas the latter is duplicated as many times as necessary. Macros involve two separate phases. Handling the definition and handling the expansions. A macro can only be defined once but it can be expanded many times. Handling the definition is a relatively simple process. The assembler reads the Definition from the source files and saves it in a special table, the Macro Definition Table (MDT).The assembler does not try to check the definition for errors, to assemble it, execute it, or do anything else with it. A macro processor is a program that copies a stream of text from one place to another, making a systematic set of replacements as it does so. Macro processors are often embedded in other programs, such as assemblers and compilers. Sometimes they are standalone programs that can be used to process any kind of text. Macro processors have been used for language expansion (defining new language constructs that can be expressed in terms of existing language components), for systematic text replacements that require decision making, and for text reformatting (e.g. conditional extraction of material from an HTML file).

6. Differentiate linkers and loaders. Answer

Linker Linker is a program that takes one or more objects generated by a compiler and combines them into a single executable program. Linker is a program that takes one or more objects generated by a compiler and combines them into a single executable program. Once a linker has scanned all of the input files to determine segment sizes, symbol definitions and symbol references, figured out which library modules to include, and decided where in the output address space all of the segments will go, the next stage the heart of the linking process, relocation is. We use relocation to refer both to the process of adjusting program addresses to account for non-zero segment origins, and the process of resolving references to external symbols, since the two are frequently handled together. The linker's first pass lays out the positions of the various segments and collects the segment-relative values of all global symbols in the program. Once the linker determines the position of each segment, it potentially needs to fix up all storage addresses to reflect the new locations of the segments. On most architecture, addresses in data are absolute, while those embedded in instructions may be absolute or relative. The linker needs to fix up accordingly, as we'll discuss later Loaders Loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs from executables (i.e., executable files) into memory, preparing them for execution and then executing them. Loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs from executables (i.e., executable files) into memory, preparing them for execution and then executing them. In computing, a loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs. It is one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, as it places programs into memory and prepares them for execution. Loading a program involves reading the contents of executable file, the file containing the program text, into memory, and then carrying out other required preparatory tasks to prepare the executable for running. Once loading is complete, the operating system starts the program by passing control to the loaded program code.