TOOLS: a unifying approach to object-oriented language interpretation

Abstract

The object-oriented paradigm is applied to the interpreting of programming languages. An intermediate representation of a program is created as a collection of objects representing various entities in the conceptual world of the source language. These objects cover both the static and the dynamic aspects of a program. As a major advantage of this approach, issues that are traditionally handled by very different techniques (like symbol table management and the generation and execution of intermediate code) can be treated in a unified manner. The specification language of an interpreter generator based on these principles is described.