This paper reports the relationship between formal description of semantics (i.e., interpreter) of a programming language and an actual compiler. The paper also describes a method to automatically generate an actual compiler from a formal description which is, in some sense, the partial evaluation of a computation process. The compiler-compiler inspired by this method differs from conventional ones in that the compilercompiler based on our method can describe an evaluation procedure (interpreter) in defining the semantics of a programming language, while the conventional one describes a translation process.

Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) provides a framework to give an operational semantics to programming and specification languages, which, because of its intuitive appeal and flexibility, has found considerable application in the theory of concurrent processes. Even though SOS is widely used in programming language semantics at large, some of its most interesting theoretical developments have taken place within concurrency theory. In particular, SOS has been successfully applied as a formal tool to establish results that hold for whole classes of process description languages. The concept of rule format has played a major role in the development of this general theory of process description languages, and several such formats have been proposed in the research literature. This chapter presents an exposition of existing rule formats, and of the rich body of results that are guaranteed to hold for any process description language whose SOS is within one of these formats. As far as possible, the theory is developed for SOS with features like predicates and negative premises.

The history of ideas that led to the first formalization of the syntax and semantics of PLII is sketched. The definition method and notation are known as the Vienna Definition Language (VDL). The paper examines the relationship between VDL and both denotational semantics and the axiomatic approach to programming language definition. 1.

Formal semantic description is significant for design, reasoning and standardization of programming languages, and it plays an important part in the optimization of the compiler. However, compared to the amount of effort that has been made to the research of various semantic frameworks over more than forty years, their actual applications are definitely frustrating. This survey reviews the history of developments on semantic description frame- works for programming languages. It also illustrates features and actual applications of the main frameworks (including operational, deno- tational, axiomatic and hybrid semantics). In some practical aspects, such as comprehensibility, extensibility and applicability, the qualitative comparisons of these frameworks are given distinctly. It suggests that a more popular formal semantic description should behave more elegantly in readability, modularity, abstractness, comparability, reasonability, applicability and tool-support.

Abstract: The question as to the correct block exit strategy, retention or deletion, is resolved by formally comparing the contour model and the stack model, each of which implements one of the strategies, to the copy rule, a formal definition of block structuring. Block structure was introduced with the programming language Algol 60 [Nau 60,63] primarily to provide the ability to define local variables. Since then the notion of block structure has been

This is a report on the work of the Computation Structures Group of Project MAC toward the design and specification of a common base language for programs and information structures. We envision that the meanings of programs expressed in practical source languages will be defined by rules of translation into the base language. The meanings of programs in the base language is fixed by rules of interpretation which constitute a transition system called the interpreter for the base language. We view the base language interpreter as the functional specification of a computer system in which-emphasis is placed on programming generality -- the ability of users to build complex programs by combining independently written program modules.