What (who) is single assignment - definition
Wikipedia
In compiler design, static single assignment form (often abbreviated as SSA form or simply SSA) is a property of an intermediate representation (IR) that requires each variable to be assigned exactly once and defined before it is used. Existing variables in the original IR are split into versions, new variables typically indicated by the original name with a subscript in textbooks, so that every definition gets its own version. In SSA form, use-def chains are explicit and each contains a single element.
SSA was proposed by Barry K. Rosen, Mark N. Wegman, and F. Kenneth Zadeck in 1988. Zadeck shared a brief history of how SSA came into being in his presentation The Development of Static Single Assignment Form at the "Static Single-Assignment Form Seminar" conducted at the Saarland University. Ron Cytron, Jeanne Ferrante and the previous three researchers at IBM developed an algorithm that can compute the SSA form efficiently.
One can expect to find SSA in a compiler for Fortran, C, C++, or Java (Android Runtime); whereas in functional language compilers, such as those for Scheme and ML, continuation-passing style (CPS) is generally used. SSA is formally equivalent to a well-behaved subset of CPS excluding non-local control flow, which does not occur when CPS is used as intermediate representation. So optimizations and transformations formulated in terms of one immediately apply to the other.
