Application Software, Domain-Specific Languages, and Language Design Assistants

While application software does the real work, domain-specific languages (DSLs) are tools to help produce it efficiently, and language design assistants in turn are meta-tools to help produce DSLs quickly. DSLs are already in wide use (HTML for web pages, Excel macros for spreadsheet applications, VHDL for hardware design, ...), but many more will be needed for both new as well as existing application domains. Language design assistants to help develop them currently exist only in the basic form of language development systems. After a quick look at domain-specific languages, and especially their relationship to application libraries, we survey existing language development systems and give an outline of future language design assistants.Comment: To be presented at SSGRR 2000, L'Aquila, Ital

A pretty-printer for every occasion

Tool builders dealing with many different languages, and language designers require sophisticated pretty-print techniques to minimize the time needed for constructing and adapting pretty-printers. We combined new and existing pretty-print techniques in a generic pretty-printer that satisfies modern pretty-print requirements. Its features include language independence, customization, and incremental pretty-printer generation. Furthermore, we emphasize that the recent acceptance of XML as international standard for the representation of structured data demands flexible pretty-print techniques, and we demonstrate that our pretty-printer provides such technology

Arcadia, a software development environment research project

The research objectives of the Arcadia project are two-fold: discovery and development of environment architecture principles and creation of novel software development tools, particularly powerful analysis tools, which will function within an environment built upon these architectural principles.Work in the architecture area is concerned with providing the framework to support integration while also supporting the often conflicting goal of extensibility. Thus, this area of research is directed toward achieving external integration by providing a consistent, uniform user interface, while still admitting customization and addition of new tools and interface functions. In an effort to also attain internal integration, research is aimed at developing mechanisms for structuring and managing the tools and data objects that populate a software development environment, while facilitating the insertion of new kinds of tools and new classes of objects.The unifying theme of work in the tools area is support for effective analysis at every stage of a software development project. Research is directed toward tools suitable for analyzing pre-implementation descriptions of software, software itself, and towards the production of testing and debugging tools. In many cases, these tools are specifically tailored for applicability to concurrent, distributed, or real-time software systems.The initial focus of Arcadia research is on creating a prototype environment, embodying the architectural principles, which supports Ada1 software development. This prototype environment is itself being developed in Ada.Arcadia is being developed by a consortium of researchers from the University of California at Irvine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, TRW, Incremental Systems Corporation, and The Aerospace Corporation. This paper delineates the research objectives and describes the approaches being taken, the organization of the research endeavor, and current status of the work

AN ENVIRONMENT FOR ENGINEERING EXTENDED AFFIX GRAMMAR ENVIRONMENTS

Existing formalisms for the specification of programming environments are complex and strongly biased by the problems of environment generation. It has been investigated whether a simple two-level grammar, describing a programming language, can be used without further modification for the generation of an environment for that language. We believe that there is enough information in most language definitions - albeit implicitly - to generate most of the tools used in syntax-directed editors. This paper proposes some simple and elegant improvements in the use of place- holders and templates, and in the unparsing mechanism. Although the improvements are implemented in a completely newly designed prototype they can also be applied to existing syntax-directed editors to improve their workability

The State of the Art in Language Workbenches. Conclusions from the Language Workbench Challenge

Language workbenches are tools that provide high-level mechanisms for the implementation of (domain-specific) languages. Language workbenches are an active area of research that also receives many contributions from industry. To compare and discuss existing language workbenches, the annual Language Workbench Challenge was launched in 2011. Each year, participants are challenged to realize a given domain-specific language with their workbenches as a basis for discussion and comparison. In this paper, we describe the state of the art of language workbenches as observed in the previous editions of the Language Workbench Challenge. In particular, we capture the design space of language workbenches in a feature model and show where in this design space the participants of the 2013 Language Workbench Challenge reside. We compare these workbenches based on a DSL for questionnaires that was realized in all workbenches

Yashar : a ruled based meta-tool for program development

Yashar is a rule based meta-tool for rapidly producing tools to increase programming speed through automating restructuring of existing source code modules so they can be reused, generating of syntax-directed tools, language-to-language translation, automated document generation , and various debugging tools. The main significance of Yashar is that it can be tailored to a wide variety of applications through the specification of rules. In this paper we describe the rule processor, rule syntax, and how to create an instance of Yashar for translating Modula-2 source programs into equivalent C source programs, automatically. Finally, we conclude that Yashar is a generalized meta-tool which can be tailored to a wide variety of application-specific tools by hand-crafting a small number of application-specific interface and support routines.Keywords: Programming environment, program transformation, source code mutation, syntax directed tools, rapid prototyping, source language to source language translation

A rule based approach to program development

A rule based transformational model for program development and a metatool based on the above model is presented. The meta-tool can be instantiated to create various program development tools such as tools for building reusable software components, language directed editors, language to language translators, program instrumentation, structured document generator, and adaptive language based prettyprinters. This new rule based approach has two important features: 1) it is language independent and can be applied to various languages, and 2) provides a powerful escape mechanism for extending the semantics of the rules. Instances of the meta-tool for restructuring source programs for building abstract components and their refinement to concrete instances, source-to-source translation, and source contraction and expansion tools for improving readability and understanding are described