Semantics Engineering with PLT Redex

This text is the first comprehensive presentation of reduction semanticsin one volume; it also introduces the first reliable and easy-to-use tool set forsuch forms of semantics. Software engineers have long known that automatic toolsupport is critical for rapid prototyping and modeling, and this book is addressedto the working semantics engineer (graduate student or profes

This text is the first comprehensive presentation of reduction semanticsin one volume; it also introduces the first reliable and easy-to-use tool set forsuch forms of semantics. Software engineers have long known that automatic toolsupport is critical for rapid prototyping and modeling, and this book is addressedto the working semantics engineer (graduate student or professional languagedesigner). The book comes with a prototyping tool suite to develop, explore, test, debug, and publish semantic models of programming languages. With PLT Redex, semanticists can formulate models as grammars and reduction models on theircomputers with the ease of paper and pencil. The text first presents a framework forthe formulation of language models, focusing on equational calculi and abstractmachines, then introduces PLT Redex, a suite of software tools for expressing thesemodels as PLT Redex models. Finally, experts describe a range of models formulatedin Redex. PLT Redex comes with the PLT Scheme implementation, available free athttp: //www.plt-scheme.org/. Readers can download the software and experiment withRedex as they work their way through the book.