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"but easy for it to reason about the high-level semantics."

Is it? Does it make it possible to argue about such things as that mappings can be fused, for example? I keep wondering about the possibility of very-high-level algebraic transformations of programs (although admittedly, this could be shifted into some kinds of CASE tools instead).

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It makes it easy to verify that the high-level semantics are only those allowed by the language. It's fairly easy to look at an AST and tell if it is a legal construct in your language.

>Is it? Does it make it possible to argue about such things as that mappings can be fused, for example?

It makes it possible to know that you are "fusing mappings." In the assembly language, you would have a hard time knowing that this is what you were doing, since it communicates semantics with too much granularity.

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