The Use of Translator Implementation Methods for Writing Nonprocedural Interfaces to Application Software Systems

One of the results of advances in computer hardware technology is a wider use of computers in almost all areas of society. There is a need to make it possible for many people to use application software systems that are produced for different areas. For people without data processing backgrounds it would seem wise to use a nonprocedural interface to these systems. The implementation of a nonprocedural interface as a part of an application software system can be facilitated using aspects of the theory and practice of the translator construction for programming languages. The purpose of this paper is to introduce programmers who lack theoretical background and/or practical experience in the area of translator design and implementation to the relevant aspects of its theory and practice

Hardware architecture specification and constraint-based WCET computation

International audienceThe analysis of the worst-case execution times is necessary in the design of critical real-time systems. To get sound and precise times, the WCET analysis for these systems must be performed on binary code and based on static analysis. OTAWA, a tool providing WCET computation, uses the Sim-nML language to describe the instruction set and XML files to describe the microarchitecture. The latter information is usually inadequate to describe real architectures and, therefore, requires specific modifications, currently performed by hand, to allow correct time calculation. In this paper, we propose to extend Sim-nML in order to support the description of modern microarchitecture features along the instruction set description and to seamlessly derive the time calculation. This time computation is specified as a constraint solving problem that is automatically synthesized from the extended Sim-nML. Thanks to its declarative aspect, this approach makes easier and modular the description of complex features of microprocessors while maintaining a sound process to compute times