Multiple Interpretations of Domain-Specific Languages

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9970980 Launchbury, John Oregon Graduate InstituteMultiple Interpretations of Domain-specific LanguagesRecently, domain-specific languages (DSLs) have become a popular topic of research. Their promise is in their expressiveness. The programmer becomes concerned with specifying what computation is to be performed, and not with low level detail such as storage, or the order in which to perform computation. When a DSL is defined, the designer will have a primary interpretation in mind. For hardware description languages, for example, the primary interpretation may be a description of how individual gates and primitive circuits are to be wired together. However, DSLs also often have secondary interpretations. Again, a hardware description language may have simulators that provide it with a different semantics: an executionsemantics, which allow for testing circuits before they are committed to silicon. For these two distinct meanings to be useful, they must be coherent in some precise sense, perhaps expressed by a commuting diagram. This research investigates the principles and practice of multiple interpretations of DSLs. The expected outcomes include techniques for providing multiple coherent interpretations to DSLs; application of these techniques in the context of Hawk, a domain-specific language for specifying microprocessor microarchitectures; and a demonstration of the value of multiple interpretations by obtaining new results in microarchitecture verification.