A definitional interpreter should be clear and easy to write, but it may run 4–10 times slower than a well-crafted bytecode interpreter. In a case study focused on implementation choices, we explore ways of making definitional interpreters faster without expending much programming effort. We implement, in OCaml, interpreters based on three semantics for a simple subset of Lua. We compile the OC...

The influence of adult foreign-language acquisition on human brain organization is poorly understood. We studied cortical thickness and hippocampal volumes of conscript interpreters before and after three months of intense language studies. Results revealed increases in hippocampus volume and in cortical thickness of the left middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior temporal g...

Communication is the greatest barrier in health care provision for people of non-English speaking backgrounds. The New South Wales Health Standard Procedures stipulate that the Health Care Interpreter Service must be used in consultations with clients who cannot fully comprehend English. This study explored the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings of physiotherapists toward health care interpreter...

In this tutorial, we program big-step and small-step total interpreters for the While language extended with input and output primitives. While is a simple imperative language consisting of skip, assignment, sequence, conditional and loop. We first develop trace-based interpreters for While. Traces are potentially infinite nonempty sequences of states. The interpreters assign traces to While pr...

INTRODUCTION Arabic-speaking migrants have constituted a growing population in recent years. This entails major challenges to ensure good communication in the healthcare encounter in order to provide individual and holistic healthcare. One of the solutions to ensure good communication between patient and healthcare staff who do not share the same language is to use a professional interpreter. T...

Recently, there has been an increased need for sign language interpreting for individuals with hearing disabilities. However, health problems among sign language interpreters (hereafter,“interpreters”)have become a serious problem (DeCaro, Feuerstein & Hurwitz, 1992, Feuerstein & Fitzgerd, 1992, Peper & Gibney, 1999, Stedt, 1992). DeCaro et al. (1992) examined interpreters working at educationa...

The Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment (EIPA) is as an important research tool for examining the quality of interpreters who use American Sign Language or a sign system in classroom settings, but it is not currently applicable to educational interpreters who use Cued Speech (CS). In order to determine the feasibility of extending the EIPA to include CS, a pilot EIPA test was develop...

Many guest languages are implemented using the Java Virtual Machine as a host environment. There are two major implementation choices: custom compilers and so-called hosted interpreters. Custom compilers are complex to build but offer good performance. Hosted interpreters are comparatively simpler to implement but until now have suffered from poor performance. We studied the performance of host...

We propose the neural programmer-interpreter (NPI): a recurrent and composi-tional neural network that learns to represent and execute programs. NPI has three learnable components: a task-agnostic recurrent core, a persistent key-value program memory, and domain-specific encoders that enable a single NPI to operate in multiple perceptually diverse environments with distinct affordances. By lear...

We show how to construct in a pure, lazy functional language Haskell a low-level, FORTH-like (stack based, postfix style) virtual machine, used as a target platform in our compilation course for computer science students. The implementation is clear, reasonably efficient, and easily extensible. Two models are presented: more “classical”, with a separate return stack, and an interpreter based on...