Realization of a translator for Janus

Abstract

The Janus programming language, viewed as the assembler for an abstract machine with a tree-based memory system, is of theoretical and practical interest, e.g., Pascal compilers. Many widely accepted theoretical formulations and conceptualizations are incorporated into it. We share these interests, but primarily want to utilize the system for its portability and other pragmatic contributions. Realizations of the abstract machine on a real machine is of interest as the complementary component in the study of language development.The central purpose of this paper is to describe some basic aspects of the implementation of Janus especially as they relate to a Data General Eclipse S/l30 (in the Computer Laboratory at Alabama-Birmingham). These implementation features have been driven by certain computing goals, mostly in non-numerical areas: table processing, list processing, and logic programming. Recent progress has focused on such topics as the core computation features and realization of a decision-table interpreter (which is part of a complex of table processors that incorporate up to five different machines). The paper overviews the various aspects of this work and focuses on the details in major applications.