AbstractAutomatic production of one‐pass compilers from attribute grammars is considered. An examination of a one‐pass grammar for the programming language Euclid shows that the present definition of one‐pass grammars is too general: the space behaviour of the produced compilers differs from that found in conventional hand‐written compilers. A new class of attribute grammars is defined. The class models naturally the use of space in a hand‐written compiler. This implies that the compiler produced automatically on the basis of the grammar uses space in the same way as a practical hand‐written recursive descent compiler. Furthermore, a graphical notation is introduced as a design tool for obtaining grammars in the pro