The Abstract Machine A Pattern for Designing Abstract Machines

Because of the increasing gap between modern high-level programming languages and existing hardware, it has often become necessary to introduce intermediate languages and to build abstract machines on top of the primitive hardware. This paper describes the ABSTRACTMACHINE, a structural pattern that captures the essential features addressing the definition of abstract machines. The pattern describes both the static and dynamic features of abstract machines as separate components, as well as it considers the instruction set and the semantics for these instructions as other first-order components of the pattern.