Concepts and Semantics of Programming Languages 2

Appendix: Questions to Guide Learning

In Chapter 1, we created a set of checks – in the form of questions – for grasping the precise meaning of syntactic constructs and keywords offered by a programming language. This appendix groups these questions into a list. The reader will thus find a plan for investigating the semantics of the language they wish to appropriate, by analyzing documents and reference manuals of this language.

QUESTION 1.1.– How is the source language under consideration – referred to here as MYL – translated into binary code: is it compiled, interpreted or compiled to bytecode and then interpreted on a virtual machine? Does it offer both a compiler and an interpreter of the source code? Is MYL a typed language? Is it strongly typed (i.e. does every expression have one unique type)? Is it statically typed (typing done only by the compiler)? If not, does the language offer a notion of a type that prohibits certain operations or that determines the size of memory allocation?

QUESTION 1.2.– Does MYL offer at least one syntactic construct for the notion of kit? If not, how can this notion emerge from the functionalities of the language, using for example its file management, as we would do in C? (see the introduction of the concept of a weak kit in section 2.3.2 of Chapter 2).

QUESTION 1.3.– Does MYL have multiple namespaces? How is the membership of an identifier of a given namespace determined (syntactic construct, naming convention, etc.)?

QUESTION 1.4.– What ...