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Abstract : |
Action semantics is a semantic meta-language developed by Mosses and Watt for specifying programming languages. The work reported in this thesis is part of a project to develop a system, called ACTRESS, that is a semantics-directed compiler generator based on action semantics. The aims of this project are to demonstrate the suitability of action semantics for this task, and to produce a system that improves on the performance of previous semantics-directed compiler generators. Moreover the ACTRESS system aims to accept a wide range of programming languages, including dynamically-scoped and dynamically-typed languages, but not to penalise the implementations of statically-typed or statically-bound languages as a result. ACTRESS automatically generates a compiler from an action semantic description of a programming language, and has been used to generate compilers for a small declarative language and a small imperative language. The generated compiler uses a number of standard modules to compile the action denoting a program into efficient object code. Amongst these modules is the action notation sort checker. The role of the, |
