Re:Pyjion – A Python JIT Compiler
by aw1621107 on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @02:23PM
(#29166200)
Out of curiosity, how many languages would meet those criteria? Only one I can think of off the top of my head is CompCert's C dialect. Are there others?
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Re:Pyjion – A Python JIT Compiler
by chrisseaton on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @02:29PM
(#29166268)
It's a spectrum - some languages do it a lot better than others. Not having anything more than a conversational English description of what it does is definitely the lower end of the spectrum. I'm sure very few are doing it perfectly, but for example Java has a formal semantics.
> but for example Java has a formal semantics.
I don't think that's really true. The Java language specification is entirely prose. The book you linked to was written by "outsider" authors and published in 1999 (!).
Re:Pyjion – A Python JIT Compiler
by chrisseaton on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @05:22PM
(#29168315)
That was just one example of many - there's a whole cottage industry of writing formal semantics for Java.
https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/publications/bogdanas-rosu-2015-...
None of them are official, and I bet they make major simplifications (the one you just linked to is for Java 1.4). I doubt actual language/tooling implementors benefit much from them.