| Abstract: | Certain ambiguities in the definition of Pascal imperil the portability of Pascal programs. Specifications and an implementation of alternative interpretations are presented. Context-free grammars augmented with guarded commands are demonstrated as a notation for specifying the static context-sensitive constraints of programming languages. Most of the advantages of context-free grammars are preserved and yet the potential range of the syntactic definition component has been extended to encompass all static constraints. Context-sensitive syntax typically tends to either clutter the semantic definition component or (as with type equivalence in Pascal) result in undesirable implementor-dependent decisions. An implementation of a CFG-based parser that automatically checks for the defined context-sensitive constraints is also described. In addition stepwise abstraction is introduced as a practical technique for communicating formal programming language definitions. |
