Environment primitive operators in programming languages
Richard O. Clark, James F. Leathrum · 1973
An extensible language implies that the fundamental semantics of a programming language are included in the base language. Those basic operations which are not so defined cannot be produced by extension. One aspect which has not been decomposed into a set of primitive actions is that of environmental operators. These are operators which describe the binding between a symbol, its value-structure, and a value. As a result, the execution environment of the base language applies to each extension and the style of the language remains fixed. The same remarks also apply to formal semantic descriptions of programming languages. In this paper a value storage mechanism, a value reference mechanism, and a set of binding operators are proposed which permit the execution of a program in the context of a FORTRAN, ALGOL, PL/1, or APL environment.