Partial Evaluation of Computation Process - An Approach to a Compiler-Compiler

This paper reports the relationship between formal description of semantics (i.e., interpreter) of a programming language and an actual compiler. The paper also describes a method to automatically generate an actual compiler from a formal description which is, in some sense, the partial evaluation of a computation process. The compiler-compiler inspired by this method differs from conventional ones in that the compilercompiler based on our method can describe an evaluation procedure (interpreter) in defining the semantics of a programming language, while the conventional one describes a translation process.