Grace is an object-oriented programming language designed to aid teaching programming. The specification of Grace and its various implementations have, to varying degrees, grown out of sync. The purpose of our study is to create a single source of truth for the semantics of the Grace programming language. We define a specification of the dynamic semantics of Grace which, at the time of writing, is nearly complete, can be easily understood by a human reader, is concise and derives an implementation for the language.

This talk will bring to discussion relevant features of the language by means of excerpts from the specification. We will offer a conceptual overview of the meta-interpretation technique used to obtain the language runtime and expose the challenges we face in the future in order to achieve good runtime performance.