Implementation of a System Description Language and Its Semantic Functions

摘要

The thesis describes the design of a language to describe arbitrary systems,called Glass. An important feature of Glass is that it allows multiple interpretations of the system descriptions. For example, when digital circuits are described in Glass, it is possible to derive a program from this description to simulate the behavior of a circuit, and for Glass descriptions of suitable analog circuits, it is possible to derive an input file for circuit simulation programs like Spice. Each of these interpretations is called a semantic function. Because of this feature, Glass is said to have multiple semantics. Having multiple semantics is only useful if it is easy to define new semantic functions on Glass. Therefore, difficult parts of a semantic function, such as parsing and correctness checking, should be provided to the author of semantic functions, so that only the essence of the semantic function must be written. For this reason the author has developed a program, called Tm, to generate the necessary code to communicate with these parsing and checking programs. Tm is able to generate code for a number of programming languages, providing more flexibility in the implementation of semantic functions. (Copyright (c) 1991 by C. van Reeuwijk.)