This discussion of language translation deals with some of the aspects of the translation of higher level programming languages to lower level machine languages. We do not here consider the computer application area of translation of one natural language, such as Russian, to another natural language such as English. Machine translation of natural languages is a much more complex problem. We begin with some background concepts from mathematics.
Semantic analysis deals with the meaning of correctly formed sentences.
We start with the problem of syntax analysis. We need some method of specifying, precisely, the collection of syntactically correct sentences of a language. Inductive specification is a tool which may be applied to form strings of symbols chosen from an alphabet. Inductive specification is a method of precisely specifying a set of values. As an example, consider the following specification of a certain subset of the natural numbers.