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Treatment of tab characters by a compiler
Author(s) -
Waite W. M.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380151108
Subject(s) - compiler , computer science , programming language , reading (process) , overhead (engineering) , process (computing) , analyser , parallel computing , physics , linguistics , optics , philosophy
How expensive is it for a compiler to process horizontal tab characters introduced arbitrarily into program text? The measurements discussed in this note show that if tabs are uniformly expanded by the source text input module of the compiler, the process of reading and tokenizing the source program is slowed by about 20 per cent. This overhead can be completely eliminated by using an ‘extra space count’ in the lexical analyser instead of a uniform expansion.