Implementation of an interpreter for abstract equations

This paper summarizes a project, introduced in [HO79, HO82b], whose goal is the implementation of a useful interpreter for abstract equations that is absolutely faithful to the logical semantics of equations. The Interpreter was first distributed to Berkeley UNIX VAX sites in May, 1983. The main novelties of the interpreter are (1) strict adherence to semantics based on logical consequences; (2) “lazy” (outermost)evaluation applied uniformly; (3) an implementation based on table-driven pattern matching, with no run-time penalty for large sets of equations; (4) strict separation of syntactic and semantic processing, so that different syntaxes may be used for different problems.

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