[TUHS] Edison Design Group C Front End

[Luther Johnson]

... of course it is serialized, there has to be some convention on
writing a tree out in some order to a file ... well anyway I'm sure they
can tell you what that product is and does.

On 08/13/2024 02:08 PM, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I don't know if you've seen this, but:
>
> https://www.edg.com/
>
> Edison Design Group has produced many compiler front ends, this part
> of a compiler scans and parse the input language, and emits an
> intermediate representation, the first representations in the chain of
> compiler phases are usually a parse tree, then a cleaned-up version of
> the parse tree that has removed all sorts of contingent data, tied to
> the the original program, but not necessary for further processing -
> this is usually called the 'abstract syntax tree'. I've never used EDG
> products in my work, but I have talked with them a couple of times. I
> imagine if you have an EDG front end, in addition to that output you
> describe, it probably is meant to write some (possibly serialized)
> version of an abstract syntax tree to some file somewhere (perhaps
> with the right options on invocation).
>
> You could call them and ask them, they seemed very friendly and
> helpful a couple of years ago when I talked to them.
>
> On 08/13/2024 12:41 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a
>> mysterious file - /usr/lib/ecfe.  It turns out that this is the
>> Edison Design Group C (not C++) Front End, included almost certainly
>> by accident with the last release of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX
>> 4.  No other piece of the compiler toolchain references the EDG
>> product in any way and there is no documentation for it whatsoever.
>>
>> The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to
>> source translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product
>> - is that correct?  I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used
>> in the Apogee C compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it
>> does appear that "cfe" is the same EDG product.  Unfortunately there
>> is no documentation specific to the C front end, and I don't have a
>> license for Apogee C so I can't run the compiler to see how it's
>> calling cfe.  Just running a C file "blah.c" through the IRIX front
>> end with no switches results in a transformed file "blah.int.c".
>> Unfortunately running anything even moderately complex through the
>> front end results in code that either doesn't compile or doesn't run,
>> so I feel that I must be missing some flags or basic options.
>>
>> Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or
>> any documentation/information in general about the EDG product?  My
>> usual sources came up empty.
>>
>> -Henry
>