Frameworks for Reasoning about Syntax that Utilize Quotation and Evaluation

It is often useful, if not necessary, to reason about the syntactic structure of an expression in an interpreted language (i.e., a language with a semantics). This paper introduces a mathematical structure called a syntax framework that is intended to be an abstract model of a system for reasoning about the syntax of an interpreted language. Like many concrete systems for reasoning about syntax, a syntax framework contains a mapping of expressions in the interpreted language to syntactic values that represent the syntactic structures of the expressions; a language for reasoning about the syntactic values; a mechanism called quotation to refer to the syntactic value of an expression; and a mechanism called evaluation to refer to the value of the expression represented by a syntactic value. A syntax framework provides a basis for integrating reasoning about the syntax of the expressions with reasoning about what the expressions mean. The notion of a syntax framework is used to discuss how quotation and evaluation can be built into a language and to define what quasiquotation is. Several examples of syntax frameworks are presented. ∗This research was supported by NSERC. †Address: Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected].