A systems implementation language for small computers
ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1973
This paper concerns the development of a family of higher level languages which are to serve as the target languages in the decompiling of assembler coded modules of small computer operating systems. The main objective is the design of a machine independent language to serve as the nucleus of these higher level languages, each of which will ultimately have to possess characteristics unique to the operating system for which it was designed. The work involved in the development of the nucleus language is part of a research effort intended to show that debugged assembler coded systems programs for a specific class of byte-oriented machines can be concisely represented in a higher level language and that this higher level representation can be easily moved from one machine in this class to another. It is our primary purpose here to describe the main features of the nucleus language, and, where space permits, to suggest some of the reasons why these features were included.