From: Guillermo (Bill) J. Rozas
Subject: Re: Compiler abstractions [was: Wanted: programming language for 9 yr old]
Date:
Message-ID: <GJR.95Oct5175103@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com>
In article <··················@atomic.cs.princeton.edu> ·····@atomic.cs.princeton.edu (Matthias Blume) writes:
| After all, there are purely logical calculi (e.g. Turing machines,
| RAMs, lambda-calculus, denotational semantics, ...), which are
| adequate to explain the properties of computing and of programming
| languages without any need to mention actual hardware.
Hah? Turing machines, RAM, lambda-calculus and denotational semantics
ARE specifications for hardware no less and no more than the ISA
(instruction set architecture) for any commercial processor. A
computer architecture manual is a description of a formal langugage
for carrying out computations. These days such a language is often
defined formally in terms of some other formal language.