Enabling Navigability of Programming Language Specifications: A Case of ECMAScript (JavaScript) Standard Library Specification

Abstract

Many widely adopted programming languages (e.g., C++, Java, JavaScript, WebAssembly) have specification documents that provide authoritative answers about the language and its semantics. However, such specification documents are oftentimes demanding to read and navigate. This especially manifests when a text, a PDF, or an HTML document describes the language semantics using a pseudo-code notation—which is treated as text rather than code. Readers of a language specification are thus left without any dedicated tool support to navigate the pseudo-code.