On the definitional method of standard PL/I

  • Authors:
  • David Beech

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM United Kingdom Laboratories, Hursley Park, Winchester, England

  • Venue:
  • POPL '73 Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1973

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Abstract

In order to define the semantics of PL/I in a form which is both precise and readable, a method of definition has been developed which employs an abstract machine operating on tree-structured data. The classes of trees involved are defined by formal grammars, while the algorithms governing the behaviour of the machine are expressed semi-formally in prose. This algorithmic metalanguage is itself intended to have largely intuitive semantics, but these are made more precise by an indication of how they could be supported at a lower level of detail within the abstract machine.