2011 Paper 3 Question 4
Compiler Construction
(a) In a stack-based runtime system, what problem does the static link method
attempt to solve, and how does it work? [4 marks]
(b) Can static linking be used to implement a language with first-class functions?
If yes, then explain how. If no, give an example and explain how static linking
fails. [6 marks]
(c) Explain how exceptions (ML-like raise and handle) could be implemented
with a stack-oriented machine. [5 marks]
(d) A program may evaluate to an exception that has been raised all the way
to the top-level and never handled. Discuss how you might modify your
implementation in part (c) to dump debugging information when such toplevel exceptions are raised. The debugging information should include some
description of the state of the computation just before the top-level exception
was raised. [5 marks]