Program structure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel representation of programs as oriented word trees, enabling direct semantic specification and execution modeling through tree structures that incorporate program words in nodes and arrows.

Contribution

It proposes a new syntactic representation of programs as oriented word trees, integrating words in nodes and arrows for enhanced semantic and execution modeling.

Findings

Programs can be represented as oriented word trees with words in nodes and arrows.

Semantic and execution specifications can be directly embedded in the tree structure.

The approach offers a new perspective on program syntax and semantics.

Abstract

A program is usually represented as a word chain. It is exactly a word chain that appears as the lexical analyzer output and is parsed. The work shows that a program can be syntactically represented as an oriented word tree, that is a syntactic program tree, program words being located both in tree nodes and on tree arrows. The basic property of a tree is that arrows starting from each node are marked by different words (including an empty word). Semantics can then be directly specified on such tree using either requirements or additional links, and adding instructions to some tree nodes enables program execution specification.