Hashed symbol tables for languages with explicit scope control

Susan L. Graham, William N. Joy, Olivier Roubine. Hashed symbol tables for languages with explicit scope control. In Proceedings of the 1979 SIGPLAN Symposium on Compiler Construction, Denver, Colorado, USA, August 6-10, 1979. pages 50-57, ACM, 1979. [doi]

Abstract

Newer programming languages such as Modula and Euclid provide more control than traditional Algol-like languages such as ALGOL-60 and Pascal over the inheritance, in inner scopes, of named entities available in outer scopes. They also provide mechanisms whereby chosen entities from inner scopes may be made available to outer scopes. In this paper we show how a hashed symbol table can be organized to implement these new scope rules in a time and space efficient way.