Compilers: Principles and Practice by Pearson

282 Compilers – Principles and Practice

Structures and records require compile-time support in the form of a table that maps field names

to <offset,size> tuples.

Representing and Manipulating Strings

Character strings differ from scalars, arrays and structures in several ways. The basic unit is a character,

whose typical sizes are 1- or 2-bytes. The target processor may or may not support character-size

operations. Even then, the set of supported operations on strings is usually limited – assignment,

length, concatenation and translation are usually available. On RISC processors, efficient string

operations are complex.

Strings are represented ...