This is an investigation of the extent to which parallelism can be used to speed up the execution of certain software development tasks. Parallelism is becoming commonly available in software development environments, in the form of multiprocessor workstations or in the form of networks of (uniprocessor) workstations. This research attempts to capitalize on the availability of parallelism to speed up existing software tasks as well as to contemplate the use of more ambitious software tools. Concentration is on software tools for performing language translation, including traditional programming language translation with optimization, as well as text formatting, proof checking and a variety of other software tools that can be viewed as implementing the translation of a context-free language. These language translation problems are specified as attribute grammars. These provide a high-level, functional specification of the translation process which allows the automatic construction of efficient parallel translators. There are three principal issues: 1. Strategies for efficient parallel attribute grammar evaluation and their performance relative to sequential evaluators and more traditional compilation techniques. 2. Specification of various global compiler optimization techniques in an attribute grammar framework. 3. An assessment of the generality of attribute grammars for specification of various problems not related to traditional programming language translation, including extending their use for specifications of computations on graphs rather than on trees.
