Meta Languages in Algebraic Compilers

Algebraic compilers provide a powerful and convenient mechanism for specifying language translators. With each source language operation one associates a computation for constructing its target language image; these associated computations, called derived operations, are expressed in terms of operations from the target language. Sometimes the target language operations are not powerful enough to specify the required computations and one may then need to extend the target language algebras with more computationally expressive operations. A better solution is to package them in a meta language which can be automatically composed with the target language operations to ensure that all operations needed or desired for performing a translation are provided. In this paper, we show how imperative and functional meta languages can be composed with a target language in an example which implements a temporal logic model checker as an algebraic compiler and show how meta languages can be seen as components to be combined with a source and target language to generate an algebraic compiler.