DIANA (intermediate language)

DIANA (Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada) is an intermediate language used to represent the semantics of an Ada program.

History

It was originally designed as an interface between the compiler front end (syntactic analysis) and middle end (semantic analysis) of the compiler on the one hand and the compiler back end (code generation and optimization) on the other. It is also used as an internal representation (IR) by other language tools.

DIANA is also used by PL/SQL, which is based on Ada.

DIANA is an abstract data type; its concrete implementations are defined using the IDL specification language.

DIANA descends from TCOL and AIDA, earlier representations of Ada programs.

The Ada-0 subset of Ada at Karlsruhe (1980) was first using AIDA,^[1] but later AIDA got replaced by DIANA. The full Karlsruhe Ada compilation system used DIANA as well and the IDL External Representation for marshalling between the middle-end and the code generating back-end.

References

Footnotes

^ Goos, Gerhard; Winterstein, Georg (1980). "Towards a compiler front-end for Ada". Proceedings of the ACM-SIGPLAN symposium on Ada programming language. Annual International Conference on Ada. ACM-SIGPLAN. pp. 36–46. Retrieved 2016-02-10.

General

Goos, Gerhard; Wulf, William A.; Evans, Arthur; Butler, Kenneth J. (2000). DIANA: an intermediate language for Ada. Lecture Notes In Computer Science. Vol. 161. springer. ISBN 0-387-12695-3.
DIANA Reference Manual, Draft Revision 4: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a272792.pdf Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine

[1] Goos, Gerhard; Winterstein, Georg (1980). "Towards a compiler front-end for Ada". Proceedings of the ACM-SIGPLAN symposium on Ada programming language. Annual International Conference on Ada. ACM-SIGPLAN. pp. 36–46. Retrieved 2016-02-10.

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