E. Moggi and S. Fagorzi
A monadic multi-stage
metalanguage
Submitted, 2002
We describe a metalanguage MMML, which makes explicit the order
of
evaluation (in the spirit of monadic metalanguages) and the
staging of
computations (as in languages for multi-level binding-time
analysis).
The main contribution of the paper is an operational semantics
which
is sufficiently detailed for analyzing subtle aspects of
multi-stage
programming, but also intuitive to serve as a reference
semantics.
For instance, the separation of computational types from code
types,
makes immediate the distinction between a computation for
generating
code and the generated code, and provides a basis for
multi-lingual
extensions, where a variety of programming languages (aka monads)
coexist.
The operational semantics consists of two parts: local (semantic
preserving) simplification rules, and computation steps executed
in a
deterministic order (because they may have side-effects). The
two
parts can be changed independently: the first by adding
datatypes or
recursive definitions, the second by adding other computational
effects. We focus on the computational aspects, thus we adopt a
simple type system, that can detect usual type errors, but not
the
unresolved link errors. Because of its explicit annotations,
MMML is
suitable as an intermediate language, but (in comparison to
MetaML) it
is too verbose as a programming language.
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