Compilers: Principles and Practice by Pearson

440 Appendix B

B.2.3 Symbol Table Handling

One of the most frequent operations and one which consumes major portion of execution time in an

assembly operation is Symbol Table building and look-up. A real-life assembly language program

may have hundreds or thousands of symbols in use. The data structure used to store the table and the

algorithms used to access it contribute significantly to the speed of an assembler. The operations done

on a symbol table are:

1. insert a symbol if not already present in the table;

2. look up a symbol if it is present in the table;

3. look up various attributes of a symbol;

4. modify attributes of a symbol; ...