The Abaco System: Translating Action Semantics Using Object - Oriented Languages

Luis Carlos de Sousa Menezes e Hermano Perrelli de Moura

Action semantics is a formalism designed to describe the semantics of programming languages. The most important characteristics of action semantics is its modular notation, based on terms of the English language, who eases the writing of programming languages descriptions.

In this article we propose an architecture for a new semantic directed compiler generator system named ABACO (Algebraic Based Action COmpiler). This system defines some tools that can be used to produce compilers from action semantics descriptions of programming languages. The main component of the system is the unified algebras compiler that produces C++ code from unified algebras specifications, the algebraic framework for action semantics, that is used to implement the program language description.