In this paper we present an intermediate program representation, called the program dependence graph (PDG), that makes explicit both the data and control dependence5 for each operation in a program. Data dependences have been used to represent only the relevant data flow relationships of a program. Control dependence5 are introduced to analogously represent only the essential control flow relationships of a program. Control dependences are derived from the usual control flow graph. Many traditional optimizations operate more efficiently on the PDG. Since dependences in the PDG connect computationally related parts of the program, a single walk of these dependences is sufficient to perform many optimizations. The PDG allows transformations such as vectorization, that previ-ously required special treatment of control dependence, to be performed in a manner that is uniform for both control and data dependences. Program transformations that require interaction of the two dependence types can also be easily handled with our representation. As an example, an incremental approach to modifying data dependences resulting from branch deletion or loop unrolling is intro-duced. The PDG supports incremental optimization, permitting transformations to be triggered by one another and applied only to affected dependences.

Programs are not text; they are hierarchical compositions of computational structures and should be edited, executed, and debugged in an environment that consistently acknowledges and reinforces this viewpoint. The Cornell Program Synthesizer demands a structural perspective at all stages of program development. Its separate features are unified by a common foundation: a grammar for the programming language. Its full-screen derivation-tree editor and syntax-directed diagnostic interpreter combine to make the Synthesizer a powerful and responsive interactive programming tool. Key Words and Phrases: programming environment, program development system, syntax-directed editor,