ON THE DESIGN AND SPECIFICATION OF A COMMON BASE LANGUAGE
Jack B. Dennis · 1972
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.