RESOURCE ALLOCATION WITH HIERARCHICAL SCOPE

A source code symbol can be declared to have a scope level indicative of a level in a hierarchy of scope levels, where the scope level indicates a circuit level or a sub-circuit level in the hierarchy. A novel instruction to the linker can define the symbol to be of a desired scope level. Location information indicates where different amounts of the object code are to be loaded into a system. A novel linker program uses the location information, along with the scope level information of the symbol, to uniquify instances of the symbol if necessary to resolve name collisions of symbols having the same scope. After the symbol uniquification step, the linker performs resource allocation. A resource instance is allocated to each symbol. The linker then replaces each instance of the symbol in the object code with the address of the allocated resource instance, thereby generating executable code.