ILOC

ILOC stands for an intermediate language used in compiler design education, commonly described as an intermediate representation for optimizing compilers. It is designed to be platform independent and simpler than target machine code, allowing students and researchers to focus on the core ideas of code analysis, transformation, and generation without worrying about a specific hardware architecture.

In typical teaching contexts, ILOC is a register-based, three-address code form that expresses computations and memory operations in a uniform, machine-like syntax. Its instructions generally cover arithmetic and logic operations, memory loads and stores, control flow (such as conditional and unconditional branches), and basic procedure calls. The abstraction level is kept low enough to enable straightforward implementation of common compiler optimizations, while high enough to demonstrate how high-level language features map to lower-level representations.

ILOC serves as a bridge in the compiler pipeline between front-end language processing (parsing and semantic analysis) and back-end code generation. By manipulating ILOC, students can apply optimizations such as constant folding, dead code elimination, copy propagation, and register allocation, then observe how the lowered code would be translated to real target architectures.

Because ILOC is not standardized and various courses may define its exact syntax differently, it is best viewed as an instructional tool rather than a universal language. It remains a popular concept in textbooks and courses that aim to illustrate compiler construction fundamentals without committing to a particular hardware instruction set.