Abstract
For at least 25 years, the most effective way to retarget systems software has been by using machine descriptions. But “machine description” doesn’t mean what you think. A traditional machine description does contain information about the machine, but its utility is compromised in one of two ways:
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The description is useful only in support of a particular algorithm, such as instruction-set emulation, LR parsing, or bottom-up tree matching.
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Information about the machine is inextricably intertwined with information about a particular tool’s internal representation, such as a compiler’s intermediate code.
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Ramsey, N. (2005). Building the World from First Principles: Declarative Machine Descriptions and Compiler Construction. In: Hermenegildo, M.V., Cabeza, D. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3350. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30557-6_1
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