On: raising the semantic level of a program

A friend kindly searched and found an interesting paper from 1973, Programming by semantic refinement <https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/390014.808298> JB Morris - ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1973 - dl.acm.org. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/390014.808298 While an interesting paper, it's going the opposite direction (essentially, going from an English language description down to a final programming language). But, using the L1 (highest level language), L2, ..., Ln (lowest level language) concept, I can phrase my concept better ... so ... Most programmers write at, say, the level of L3. They might write something like: mem [foo].head = something My "raising the semantic level" would be: #define HEAD(x). mem [x].head ... HEAD (foo) = something With a fair set of macros like that (HEAD, TAIL, etc), the program is now effectively written in a "new" language, L2 (a higher level language than L1). Being written in L2, the resulting code is more readable to everyone, partially because they aren't continually seeing the implementation of how ".head" / "mem" work/interact. In effect, the programmer has added a feature (linked list handling, perhaps) to L3 ... for that particular program, seemingly extending/raising the level of the language. It's that concept that I thought I saw sometime in the early 1970s :) thanks, Stan