[since I was lucky enough to be near a good university library
some 15 years ago, and have a long-standing interest in
language design, I'll try to respond to questions from the
other thread here; the hope is to turn those principles from
an obstacle to a tool in Ecmascript design]
As a long-time fan of semantic principles for language design,
I've been reading the very odd references to Tennent's design
principles in discussions here with some discomfort. In the
list archives, 'TCP' sometimes sounds like almost as big a
source of problems as 'ASI'. Also, some of the references
bear little or no resemblance to the principles I read about!
The principles are open to interpretation, and we all have our
own misconceptions about them, especially when they seem
to support what we wanted to do anyway(*). But they were
not taken out of thin air, either: they were collected from
early work on language design and language semantics.
I've always found them to lead to simpler, more consistent
language designs - they point out problems, and show how
to remove problems, but they do not make problems.
My knowledge of Tennent's principles comes from his
paper [1], not from his book, but I doubt that the difference
are that great. If you have a university library nearby, the
paper and its references are well worth reading for anyone
involved in language design - they don't have all the answers,
but many of todays problems were already under discussion
back then (you'd be surprised at the similarities;-).
Let me try to state the two principles from that paper first
(try, because I have to collect and paraphrase from the text),
followed by interpretations that I've found useful.
// principle of abstraction
Abstraction facilities may be provided for any
semantically meaningful category of syntactic
constructs
Tennent refers to 'abstraction' in a technical sense, citing
motivating examples from set theory, relations and functions,
that is from mathematics and theory of computation. Concrete
examples from programming languages include abstraction
over statements (procedures) and over expressions (functions).
Interpretation
Note the "semantically meaningful" - Tennent is talking
about semantic abstractions, represented in syntax, not
about merely syntactic abstractions!
I've found that to be the single most important issue when
using this principle: what are the semantic objects we need
to talk about, and how are they represented in our syntax?
We could, of course, decide that our language should
also serve as its own meta-language, then syntax phrases
would be semantically meaningful, and we would want
to support syntactic abstractions/macros (syntax-level
functions).
But without such a decision, we should not try to apply
the principle of abstraction to arbitrary pieces of syntax.
The second most interesting issue is that our ideas about
which parts of our language are semantically meaningful
may evolve - modules are a prime example here:
at first, we just have abstractions of statements and
expressions, and declarations happen to be a syntactic
consequence of that. But as our programs grow larger,
we notice that we want to talk about groups of declarations
as semantic objects, so now the principle of abstraction
applies, and we end up with some form of modules.
Something similar applies to break and labels:
in current Javascript, neither 'break label' nor 'label' on
its own has any meaning, they are part of loops or switch
statements. So it simply makes no sense to abstract over
break statements independent of their loop/switch - the
principle does not apply!
We might, however, decide to work out semantics for
'break label' or for 'label' on its own, and then the principle
of abstraction would ask us to think about abstractions
over these (Tennent discusses sequels as abstractions
over the 'break label' form, and mentions label parameters
as well).
The former very quickly leads towards call/cc, the latter
might be easier to implement, but also encourages more
complicated uses of labels. Either variant needs semantics
before talking about their interactions with lambdas and
the like. Similarly for 'this' and 'return'.
// principle of correspondence (paraphrasing):
The rules governing names in a language should be
designed together in order to avoid irregularities in
the manner in which the names may be used. In
particular, there should be a one-to-one correspondence
between declarative and parametric forms of introducing
names.
This goes back directly to Landin [2], and comes with an
example, comparing variable declaration for 'x' with formal
function parameter 'x':
x*(x+a) where x= b+2*c
f(b+2*c) where f(x)= x*(x+a)
Interpretation
The principle of correspondence interacts with the principle
of abstraction: our two most common ways of introducing
abstractions in programming languages involve names,
names for things we already know (variable declarations,
function declarations, constant declarations, ..) and names
for things we do not know yet (function parameters).
Abstraction tells us when to introduce naming schemes,
correspondence tells us to keep these two common forms
of naming in sync. It should not matter whether a name
comes from a declaration or formal parameter list - any
such differences needlessly complicate the language.
Correspondence is the principle that lets us say that
let(this=obj, x=5) { .. }
and
((function(x) { .. }).call(obj,5))
should be equivalent, and that anything we can do in
formal parameter lists, we should also be able to do in
declarations, and vice versa.
Generally, Tennent's paper is heavily influenced by lambda
calculus, both as a programming language (among other
work, Landin gave translations of Algol 60 into Church's
lambda calculus) and as a representation of mathematical
functions (early work on denotational semantics of
programming languages, by Strachey and others).
In particular, Landin's influence [2] is strong: Landin was
perhaps the first to separate languages into sets of problem-
oriented primitives (domain-specific, in todays terminology)
and general language framework, and he was concerned
with removing idiosyncracies from the general framework.
So my favourite way of reading Tennent's principles is as
rules for completing a language design:
- first, we choose what we want to talk about, and
how to represent it (strings, numbers, arrays, regexps,
expressions, statements, ..)
- then, we apply the principles to build up a consistent
general framework around our chosen primitives
(functions, procedures, modules, ..)
But we can also use the principles to spot gaps and
inconsistencies in existing language designs, again
focusing on the domain-independent parts of the
language.
It is of interest that Tennent's paper includes an analysis
of Pascal wrt the principles, followed by a synthesis section:
suggestions for completing Pascal to avoid the problems
discussed in the analysis section.
Hope this helps,
Claus
[1] R.D.Tennent, "Language Design Methods Based on
Semantic Principles", Acta Informatica 8, 97-112, 1977
(if you or your library have a springerlink subscription:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n43h438l03811671/ )
[2] P.J.Landin, "The next 700 programming languages",
Communications of the ACM 9, 157-164, 1966
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=2856797924573721037&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=science_links&resnum=1&ct=sl-allversions
(*) My own excursion in this area happened when I had
just about finished with a couple of design problems,
and was doing background research for the write-up.
After I encountered Tennent's way of looking at papers
I already admired, it became clear that his principles
were the simplest way to summarize the design
decisions I had made. After I finished that dissertation,
I tried to write up this view - unlike the papers above,
this isn't a must-read: you'll probably want to skip the
introduction, and possibly section 2 as well, but the
report goes into a third principle that I found very
useful, and the application of the principles to modules
might sound familiar to Ecmascript modules authors.
"On functional programming, language design, and persistence"
http://community.haskell.org/~claus/publications/fpldp.html
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