Before it can be used to describe an instruction, this operator must be specialized to a particular value of n . The purpose of this document is to propose names and types for these commonly used operators, so that tools and descriptions developed for different purposes by different people will have a better chance of interoperating. There are a number of projects we believe might benefit from a common naming convention. The Zephyr group uses named operators in lambda -RTL to describe the semantics of machine instructions. In lambda -RTL, operators may also be given infix syntax.
Some operators also have infix syntax.
There is some hope that they will develop a formal semantics for some operators. The University of Queensland Binary Translator uses named operators in its intermediate RTL and HRTL languages. There are undoubtedly other research projects that might benefit from a standard naming system for machine-level operators. I am circulating this document very widely, in the hope that it will be possible for many different groups to agree on conventional names. With a common naming convention, it should be be easier for each of these research groups to benefit from the work of the others.