Content-type: text/html Manpage of mitchell

mitchell

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: January 11, 2006
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NAME

mitchell - compiler for the mitchell programming language

SYNOPSIS

mitchell [options] infile

DESCRIPTION

This is the standard compiler for the mitchell programming language. While mitchell is featured enough to be a general-purpose language and compiler set, its specific purpose is to bootstrap itself. Towards this goal, the mitchell language and runtime specification only defines enough features to make bootstrapping the system easier. Any features which make the language suitable to another task is purely coincidence.

This manual page documents the usage of the mitchell compiler. The definition of the mitchell language is included with the compiler source and should have come as part of your installation.

In its current state, mitchell can check the syntactic validity of infile, construct an abstract syntax tree representing that input file, and check the validity of the typing of that tree. If there are any problems with syntax or type checking, a descriptive error message is printed to the screen and the compiler exits. If the program passes, the compiler exits silently.

OPTIONS

Compilers tend to have many many options for controlling the compilation process. mitchell isn't there quite yet, but the number of options is expected to grow quite a bit as the compiler gets more complicated. For this reason, the options have been broken up into categories.

Help Options

These options control the amount and type of help output from the compiler. The compiler exits immediately after processing each of these options.

-h | -help: Print a brief help summary of the most important options.
-v | -version: Print the version and configuration information of the compiler.
-verbose-help: Print all command line options and a one-line summary of each.

General Options

These options control the general compliation process.

-last-phase=phase

Stops compilation after the given required phase. If this option is not given, compilation will proceed until it terminates. If it is given, compilation will halt after the given phase leaving any temporary or debugging output files. Possible values are (in order of phase execution):

parser: Stop after parsing and tokenizing. It is not possible to stop after tokenizing, since that is not a separate phase.
typecheck: Stop after the typechecking/semantic analysis phase.
desugar-case: Stop after the case-exprs elimination pass of abstract syntax tree simplification.
desugar-decl: Stop after the promoting decl-exprs to functions pass of abstract syntax tree simplification.
lambda-lift: Stop after performing free value analysis and lambda lifting as part of abstract syntax tree simplification.

Internals Options

These options control the internal workings of the mitchell compiler and are not intended for general purpose use. They affect things like the amount of internal debugging output. Enable if you are developing the compiler or are just entirely too curious. All internal options begin with -I which strangely enough stands for "Internal".

-Idebug-parser=N

Sets the debug level for the tokenizer and parser stages of the front end. Possible values for N:

0: Normal use; no debugging output.
1: Emit debugging output upon consuming a token, entering a parser rule, and leaving a parser rule.

-Idump-absyn[=astfile]

Writes a representation of the abstract syntax tree to astfile, or infile.ast if no filename is provided. If - is given as a filename, the abstract syntax tree is written on stdout.

--Idump-free-vals[=freevalfile]

Writes out the free (unbound) values found during the multiple free value analysis passes to freevalfile, or infile.free if no filename is provided. If - is given as a filename, the free value analysis results are written on stdout.

-Idump-symtab[=symtabfile]

On exit from a level of scope (module, function, decl block), writes a string representation of the block's symbol table to symtabfile, or infile.symtab if no filename is provided. If - is given as a filename, the symbol table is written on stdout.

Warning Options

These options control the types of warnings emitted and how they are handled. Warnings will cause a message to be printed, but compilation will continue. Errors will cause a message to be printed and terminate compilation of the source program. In general, the mitchell compiler will handle more problems as errors rather than warnings in order to keep the number of runtime errors to a minimum.

-Werror: Handle warnings as errors. That is, all warnings will cause compilation to terminate as if an error had occurred.

ENVIRONMENT

This section describes how various environment variables affect the operation of the compiler.

LANG: Controls how mitchell interprets the characters in the source file. This must be set to one of the UTF-8 settings if mitchell is to process source files properly. For example, en_US.UTF-8 would be a good setting for someone in the United States. The LC_ALL environment variable overrides LANG if it is set.

AUTHOR

Chris Lumens <chris@bangmoney.org>

ENVIRONMENT

AUTHOR

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 04:43:52 GMT, January 12, 2006