Browsing by Author "Simpson, Todd G."

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    Design and verification of IFL
    (1991) Simpson, Todd G.; Birtwistle, Graham M.
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    DESIGN AND VERIFICATION OF IFL: A WIDE-SPECTRUM INTERMEDIATE FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE
    (1991-07-01) Simpson, Todd G.
    A large number of functional languages have been developed in the last decade. While semantic differences do occur between them, they differ mainly in syntax. This thesis extracts a common basis for these languages into an Intermediate Functional Language (IFL). IFL provides a portable, high level form which reduces the overhead for implementing functional languages. This is used to advantage by formally specifying and proving a compiler from IFL to a low level language. The low level language may then be targeted at either conventional or functional hardware. The SECD machine is used as an example of the latter and a compiler from the low level language to SECD machine code is specified and shown to be semantics preserving. The result is a (partially) proven compiler from IFL to the machine level. An optimization to the compiler is derived from the number of times variables are referenced.