Ex 10 INTERMEDIATE CODE GENERATION
The compilation process can be divided into a number of subtasks called phases and intermediate code generation is one of the phases of the compiler. Once the syntactic constructs are determined, the compiler can generate object code for each construct. But the compiler creates an intermediate form. It helps in code optimization and also to make a clear-cut separation between machine independent phases (lexical, syntax) and machine dependent phases (optimization, code generation). One form of intermediate code is a parse tree. A parse tree may contain variables as the terminal nodes. A binary operator will be having a left and right branch for operand1 and operand2. Another form of intermediate code is a three-address code. It has got a general structure of A = B op C, where A, B and C can be names, constants, temporary names etc. op can be any operator. Postfix notation is yet another form of intermediate code.