Language design for program manipulation

Author

Merks, Eduardus A T ; Dyck, J. Michael ; Cameron, Robert D.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci., Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby, BC, Canada

Volume

18

Issue

1

fYear

1992

fDate

1/1/1992 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

19

Lastpage

32

Abstract

The design of procedural and object-oriented programming languages is considered with respect to how easily programs written in those languages can be formally manipulated. Current procedural languages such as Pascal, Modula-2 and Ada; generally support such program manipulations, except for some annoying anomalies and special cases. Three main areas of language design are identified as being of concern from a manipulation viewpoint: the interface between concrete and abstract syntax; the relationship between the abstract syntax and static semantics naming, scoping and typing; and the ability to express basic transformations (folding and unfolding). Design principles are suggested so that the problems identified for current languages can be avoided in the future

Keywords

high level languages; object-oriented programming; software engineering; Ada; Modula-2; Pascal; abstract syntax; language design; naming; object-oriented programming languages; procedural languages; program manipulation; program manipulations; scoping; static semantics; typing; unfolding; Appropriate technology; Concrete; Data structures; Instruments; Process design; Synthesizers;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.120313

Filename

120313