Compiling Natural Semantics

Mikael Pettersson (auth.)3540659684, 9783540659686

Natural Semantics has become a popular tool among programming language researchers for specifying many aspects of programming languages. However, due to the lack of practical tools for implementation, the natural semantics formalism has so far largely been limited to theoretical applications.
This book introduces the rational meta-language RML as a practical language for natural semantics specifications. The main part of the work is devoted to the problem of compiling natural semantics, actually RML, into highly efficient code. For this purpose, an effective compilation strategy for RML is developed and implemented in the rml2c compiler. This compiler ultimately produces low-level C code. Benchmarking results show that rml2c-produced code is much faster than code resulting from compilers based on alternative implementation approaches.

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Table of contents :
Front Matter….Pages –
1 Introduction….Pages 1-4
2 Preliminaries….Pages 5-15
3 The Design of RML….Pages 17-33
4 Examples….Pages 35-56
5 Implementation Overview….Pages 57-61
6 Reducing Nondeterminism….Pages 63-84
7 Compiling Pattern Matching….Pages 85-109
8 Compiling Continuations….Pages 111-126
9 Simulating Tailcalls in C….Pages 127-152
10 Performance Evaluation….Pages 153-168
11. Concluding Remarks….Pages 169-172
A. The Definition of RML….Pages 173-221
Back Matter….Pages –