An operational semantics for Icon: Implementation of a procedural goal-directed language

The generation of compiled code for expressions in programming languages such as Icon that support goal-directed evaluation in addition to traditional control structures presents more of a challenge than generating code for traditional imperative programming languages. This paper describes a code-generation technique for translating Icon programs into a traditional high-level language. Translations into both Pascal and C are discussed. However, any language that provides function parameters and recursion is sufficient. The technique described here has been used in the implementation of an optimizing compiler for Icon.