General purpose intermediate representation of software for software development tools

U.S. Patent Number 7,146,606, Filed July 22, 2003. Various intermediate representation techniques for software development tool scenarios are described. An intermediate representation format can be used for both high level and low level representations. The intermediate representation can be built from various operands and instructions types. Various annotations can be added to the intermediate representation without modifying its format. For example, flow control and data control can be explicitly represented by threading a graph through the intermediate representation.