Compiling Natural Semantics

the long version

This book introduces the rational meta-language RML as a practical language for natural semantics specifications. The main part of the work is devoted to the problem of compiling natural semantics, actually RML, to highly efficient code. For this purpose, an effective compilation strategy for RML is developed and implemented in the rm12c compiler. This compiler finally produces low-level C code. Benchmarking results show that rm12c-produced code is much faster than code resulting from compilers based on alternative implementation approaches. Thus, the hope is supported that the introduced compilation strategy is suitable for a significant class of formal specifications.