Ott and PLT Redex are a pair of complimentary tools for the working semanticist. Ott is a tool for writing definitions of programming languages in a nice ASCII notation, which then can be typeset in LaTeX or used to generate definitions for a theorem prover (e.g. Coq). PLT Redex is a tool for specifying and debugging operational semantics. Both tools are easy to install, which is a big plus. Since the tools are quite similar, I thought it might be interesting to do a comparison of how various common tasks are done in both languages. (Also, I think the Redex manual is pretty terrible.)

Variables. In Ott, variables are defined by way of metavariables ( metavar x ), which then serve as variable (by either using the metavariable alone, or suffixing it with a number, index variable or tick).

In Redex, there is no notion of a metavariable; a variable is just another production. There are a few different ways say that a production is a variable: the simplest method is to use variable-not-otherwise-mentioned , which automatically prevents keywords from acting as variables. There are also several other variable patterns variable , variable-except and variable-prefix , which afford more control over what symbols are considered variables. side-condition may also be useful if you have a function which classifies variables.

Grammar. Both Ott and Redex can identify ambiguous matches. Ott will error when it encounters an ambiguous parse. Redex, on the other hand, will produce all valid parses; while this is not so useful when parsing terms, it is quite useful when specifying non-deterministic operational semantics (although this can have bad performance implications). check-redundancy may be useful to identify ambiguous patterns.

Binders. In Ott, binders are explicitly declared in the grammar using bind x in t ; there is also a binding language for collecting binders for pattern-matching. Ott can also generate substitution/free variable functions for the semantics. In Redex, binders are not stated in the grammar; instead, they are implemented solely in the reduction language, usually using substitution (Redex provides a workhorse substitution function for this purpose), and explicitly requiring a variable to be fresh. Redex does have a special-form in the metalanguage for doing let-binding ( term-let ), which substitutes immediately.

Lists. Ott supports two forms of lists: dot forms and list comprehensions. A dot form looks like x1 , .. , xn and requires an upper bound. A list comprehension looks like </ xi // i IN 1 .. n /> ; the bounds can be omitted. A current limitation of Ott is that it doesn’t understand how to deal with nested dot forms, this can be worked around by doing a comprension over a production, and then elsewhere stating the appropriate equalities the production satisfies.

Redex supports lists using ellipsis patterns, which looks like (e ...) . There is no semantic content here: the ellipses simply matches zero or more copies of e , which can lead to nondeterministic matches when there are multiple ellipses. Nested ellipses are supported, and simply result in nested lists. Bounds can be specified using side-conditions; however, Redex supports a limited form of bounding using named ellipses (e.g. ..._1 ), where all ellipses with the same name must have the same length.

Semantics. Ott is agnostic to whatever semantics you want to define; arbitrary judgments can be specified. One can also define judgments as usual in Redex, but Redex provides special support for evaluation semantics, in which a semantics is given in terms of evaluation contexts, thus allowing you to avoid the use of structural rules. So a usual use-case is to define a normal expression language, extend the language to have evaluation contexts, and then define a reduction-relation using in-hole to do context decomposition. The limitation is that if you need to do anything fancy (e.g. multi-hole evaluation contexts), you will have to fall back to judgment forms.

Type-setting. Ott supports type-setting by translation into LaTeX. Productions can have custom LaTeX associated with them, which is used to generate their output. Redex has a pict library for directly typesetting into PDF or Postscript; it doesn’t seem like customized typesetting is an intended use-case for PLT Redex, though it can generate reasonable Lisp-like output.

Conclusion. If I had to say what the biggest difference between Ott and PLT Redex was, it is that Ott is primarily concerned with the abstract semantic meaning of your definitions, whereas PLT Redex is primarily concerned with how you would go about matching against syntax (running it). One way to see this is in the fact that in Ott, your grammar is a BNF, which is fed into a CFG parser; whereas in PLT Redex, your grammar is a pattern language for the pattern-matching machine. This should not be surprising: one would expect each tool’s design philosophy to hew towards their intended usage.