Toward Relaxing Assumptions in Languages and their Implementations

Abstract

Language implementors frequently make pre-emptive decisions concerning the exact implementations of language features. These decisions constrain programmers' control over their computations and may tempt them to write involuted code to obtain special (or efficient) effects. In many cases, we can distinguish some properties of a language facility that are essential to the semantics and other properties that are incidental. Recent abstraction techniques emphasize dealing with such distinctions by separating the properties that are necessary to preserve the semantics from the details for which some decision must be made but many choices are adequate. We suggest here that these abstraction techniques can be applied to the problem of pre-emptive language decisions by specifying the essential properties of languages facilities in a skeleton base language and defining interfaces that will accept a variety of implementations that differ in other details.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 02, 1980
Accession Number
ADA224053

Entities

People

  • Mary Shaw
  • William A. Wulf

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Algorithms
  • Assembly Languages
  • Computations
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Encapsulation
  • Engineering
  • High Level Languages
  • Language
  • Programming Languages
  • Side Effects
  • Software Development
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Structured Programming

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Systems Analysis and Design