Expression evaluation is the process of translating expressions, such as the following, into machine instructions.
y = a*x*x + b*x + c ;
The classic, though rare, method
In some second programming and data structure
courses, expression evaluation is often
done as an example of programming with stacks.
For example an expression such as
a*x*x + b*x + c
will be parsed into the equivalent
postfix, or Reverse Polish, notation, in this case
a x x * * b x * + b c +
.
In many computer organization textbooks, this is the first step
into generating stack based assembly code similar to the following:
PUSH a PUSH x PUSH x MULT MULT PUSH b PUSH x MULT PLUS PUSH c PLUS
In a stack-based computer like the
Burroughs B5000 from the 1960’s,
an instruction like MULT
would remove the top two elements
of the stack and replace them with their product.
Stack-based scientific calculators, such as the early HP35
and today’s TI-83, operate similarly.
The popular PDF file format is also largely built on
the
stack-based programming language PostScript programming language.
Expression evaluation with stacks can be used on the most modern
computer architectures, such as the
x86-64 which has
push
and pop
instructions.
However the push
and pop
are usually used only
for passing arguments to function.
When evaluating expression, temporary “variable”s store
in high-speed registers are used to
store intermediate values.
Furthermore, C and Java have some expressions that are difficult to
perform on stack.
For example, in evaluating something like
i < 0 || A[i] == 0
,
you can’t put
i < 0
and A[i] == 0
on the stack and then call perform the logical OR operation,
because you shouldn’t
even attempt the evaluation of A[i] == 0
when i < 0
is true.
The C-to-C solution
Instead of searching for an automatic solution to
expression evaluation, we’ll try an ad hoc approach where you
translate most complex expressions into a sequence
of simple assignments
where only one operator appears on the left hand side.
We’ll need to use made-up variable names to do this
which we’ll call
τi
.
Most of the
τi
will be stored in registers.
For a while, we’re going to ignore most of those
complex C expressions that involve lvalues (locations).
This means you are not going to see pointers, the &
operator, or
structures here. Those appear in Chapter 6.
Parsing
You will need to parse your code. These means you must pay attention to your programming language’s rules of precedence to know the order in which operators are applied. In a real compiler, this part of the task is usually done with code generated by a compiler compiler such as yacc or bison.
The simple operators
The really simple operators are the arithmetic and bit-wise operators. We’ll also mention function calls in passing, but the function stack will be presented much later.
For example, a statement such as
“x = z*sin(f*d) + k
”
would be translated to a sequence of C statements similar to
the following:
τ1 = f * d ; τ2 = sin(τ1) ; τ3 = z * τ2 ; x = τ3 + k;
Just notice that the there is only one operator on the right hand side of each statement.
Very simple statements, such as
“x = τ3 + k
”
can be implemented with a couple of instructions of
your target machine instruction set.
Here’s an example implementation of this statement in the
MIPS architecture.
lw $t3,τ3 lw $t4,k add $t3,$t3,$t4 sw $t3,x
In low-cost microprocessors
some operators, such as multiplication or division, may need to be implemented
with calls to specialized functions written for your machine architecture.
For example, f*d
may need to be replaced with something like
_MultiplyDouble(f, d)
if our computer, like the PIC24,
does not support a floating point multiply operation.
Some operators will also need to be translated into short sequences of
instructions. Perhaps, a 32-bit addition will be performed as
two 16-bit additions.
When you implement the relational operators, such as >
and ==
, you must make sure that these operators
return either 0, for false, or 1, for true, as required by
the C standard. For example, here is a faithful PIC24 implementation
of the C statement
“r = x > y
;”.
CLR r ;; r <- 0 MOV x,WREG SUBR y,WREG ;; WREG <- x - y BRA LE,1f ;; go to the next 1: INC r ;; ++r only if x > y 1: