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Writing a Quad Interpreter

Posted on 2008-01-24 by lorg Leave a Comment

My compilation homework is writing a compiler from simplified CPL to Quad, a made up assembly language. The compiler was going well, and when it started to emit code, I naturally wanted to test it.

The problem is, I work on Ubuntu Linux, and the only available Quad interpreter was for Windows. Trying to run it with Wine didn’t work, and I gave up on it pretty quickly. I also didn’t want to start working on Windows. So I sat down for half an hour and wrote a Quad interpreter of my own, in Python.

Afterwards, I thought of publishing it, and sat down to write a step-by-step mode as well. I didn’t implement breakpoints, although it is quite easy.

The compiler is working now, although I do have to do the finish. Since it is a homework assignment, I will not be publishing it, but I will publish the Quad Interpreter. I hope it benefits you.

A note of caution though: I didn’t test it thoroughly . The most I did was running it with some toy programs and the output of my compiler to see if it works. It does, and that’s enough for me.

Filed under: Assembly, Compilation, computer science, Personal, Programming, Python

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