Abstract
The technique of expressing the semantics of a mechanical language in terms of the language itself is considered; an attempt is made to give a description that is independent of the specific language to which the technique is applied. The main investigation is restricted to expression languages, i.e. languages whose meaningful terms are expressions denoting constants. Lisp is used as an example, and some remarks how to extend the technique to programming languages are added.
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© 1984 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bekić, H. (1984). Defining a language in its own terms. In: Jones, C.B. (eds) Programming Languages and Their Definition. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 177. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0048937
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0048937
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