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Implementation of an interpreter for abstract equations
Author(s) -
Hoffmann Christoph M.,
O'donnell Michael J.,
Strandh Robert I.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Book series
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
ISBN - 0-89791-125-3
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380151205
Subject(s) - interpreter , computer science , programming language , unix , semantics (computer science) , table (database) , matching (statistics) , theoretical computer science , database , mathematics , statistics , software
This paper summarizes a project whose goal is the implementation of a useful interpreter for abstract equations that is absolutely faithful to the logical semantics of equations. The interpreter was first distributed to Berkeley UNIX VAX sites in May 1983. The main novelties of the interpreter are strict adherence to semantics based on logical consequences, ‘lazy’ (outermost) evaluation applied uniformly, an implementation based on table‐driven pattern matching, with no run‐time penalty for large sets of equations, and strict separation of syntactic and semantic processing, so that different syntaxes may be used for different problems.