Static semantics for syntax objects
David Fisher · 2010
Designing custom notations is essential to designing advanced systems. Although an electrical engineer could write an English description of a circuit board, explaining which components were used and how each was connected, it is not very effective for him to do so; he would do much better to draw a circuit diagram. This not only streamlines the process of circuit architecture, allowing commonly-used design idioms to be expressed concisely, but it also allows a reasoning engine, such as an automated design tool or the electrical engineer himself, to reason about the circuit, identifying redundancies, determine its behavior and find potential problem points.