1987 Reports

Choices in the Design of a Language Pre-Processor for Specifying Redundancy

Smith, Jonathan M.; Maguire, Gerald Q.

RB is a set of constructs which can be added to a programming language to specify redundancy in a program: a complete implementation of the macro processor and its support library is underway at Columbia University. While the main focus of our research is fault tolerance, we have made some observations which we believe are of interest to the programming language community. We decided that implementation of RB as a macro preprocessor for some underlying programming language (we've chosen C) best suited our needs and design goals. The remainder of this report details those goals and our decisions.