It's Time for a New Old Language

Abstract

The most popular programming language in computer science has no compiler or interpreter. Its definition is not written down in any one place. It has changed a lot over the decades, and those changes have introduced ambiguities and inconsistencies. Today, dozens of variations are in use, and its complexity has reached the point where it needs to be re-explained, at least in part, every time it is used. Much effort has been spent in hand-translating between this language and other languages that do have compilers. The language is quite amenable to parallel computation, but this fact has gone unexploited.