3rd international software language engineering conference (SLE) : pre-proceedings, October 12-13, 2010, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2010). The conference will be held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands during October 12-13, 2010 and will be co-located with The Ninth International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE'10), and The Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD). An important goal of SLE is to integrate the different sub-communities of the software-language-engineering community to foster cross-fertilization and strengthen research overall. The Doctoral Symposium at SLE 2010 contributes towards these goals by providing a forum for both early and late-stage PhD students to present their research and get detailed feedback and advice from other researchers. The SLE conference series is devoted to a wide range of topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE is an international research forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to expand the frontiers of software language engineering. SLE's foremost mission is to encourage and organize communication between communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different, more specialized, and yet complementary perspectives. SLE emphasizes the fundamental notion of languages as opposed to any realization in specific technical spaces. In this context, the term "software language" comprises all sorts of artificial languages used in software development including general-purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages, modeling and meta-modeling languages, data models, and ontologies. Software language engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, use, and maintenance of these languages. The SLE conference is concerned with all phases of the lifecycle of software languages; these include the design, implementation, documentation, testing, deployment, evolution, recovery, and retirement of languages. Of special interest are tools, techniques, methods, and formalisms that support these activities. In particular, tools are often based on, or automatically generated from, a formal description of the language. Hence, the treatment of language descriptions as software artifacts, akin to programs, is of particular interest - while noting the special status of language descriptions, and the tailored engineering principles and methods for modularization, refactoring, refinement, composition, versioning, co-evolution, and analysis that can be applied to them. The response to the call for papers for SLE 2010 was very enthusiastic. We received 79 full submissions from 108 initial abstract submissions. From these submissions, the Program Committee (PC) selected 25 papers: 17 full papers, five short papers, and two tool demonstration papers, resulting in an acceptance rate of 32%. To ensure the quality of the accepted papers, each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three PC members. Each paper was discussed in detail during the electronic PC meeting. A summary of this discussion was prepared by members of the PC and provided to the authors along with the reviews

When Systems Engineering Meets Software Language Engineering

International audienceThe engineering of systems involves many different stakeholders, each with their own domain of expertise. Hence more and more organizations are adopting Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to allow domain experts to express solutions directly in terms of relevant domain concepts. This new trend raises new challenges about designing DSLs, evolving a set of DSLs and coordinating the use of multiple DSLs for both DSL designers and DSL users. This paper explores various dimensions of these challenges, and outlines a possible research roadmap for addressing them. The message of this paper is also to claim that if language engineering techniques to design any single (disposable) language are mature, the language engineering community needs to fundamentally change its view on software language design. We need to take the next step and adopt the perspective that a software language is, fundamentally, software too and thus the result of a composition of design decisions. These design decisions should be represented as first-class entities in the software languages workbench and it should be possible, during the language lifecycle, to add, remove and change language design decisions with limited effort to go from continuous design to continuous meta-design

A personal retrospective on language workbenches

Model-driven software engineering and specifically domain-specific languages have contributed to improve the quality of software and the efficiency in the development of software. However, the design and implementation of domain-specific languages requires still an enormous investment. Language workbenches are the most important tools in the field of software language engineering. The introduction of language workbenches has alleviated partly the development effort, but there are still a few major challenges that need to be tackled. This paper presents a personal perspective on the development of tools for language engineering and language workbenches in particular and future challenges to be tackled.</p

Software meta-language engineering and CBS

The SLE conference series is devoted to the engineering principles of software languages: their design, their implementation, and their evolution. This paper is about the role of language specification in SLE. A precise specification of a software language needs to be written in a formal meta-language, and it needs to co-evolve with the specified language. Moreover, different software languages often have features in common, which should provide opportunities for reuse of parts of language specifications. Support for co-evolution and reuse in a meta-language requires careful engineering of its design.The author has been involved in the development of several meta-languages for semantic specification, including action semantics and modular variants of structural operational semantics (MSOS, I-MSOS). This led to the PLanCompS project, and to the design of its meta-language, CBS, for component-based semantics. CBS comes together with an extensible library of reusable components called ‘funcons’, corresponding to fundamental programming constructs. The main aim of CBS is to optimise co-evolution and reuse of specifications during language development, and to make specification of language semantics almost as straightforward as context-free syntax specification.The paper discusses the engineering of a selection of previous meta-languages, assessing how well they support co-evolution and reuse. It then gives an introduction to CBS, and illustrates significant features. It also considers whether other current meta-languages might also be used to define an extensible library of funcons for use in component-based semantics

When Systems Engineering Meets Software Language Engineering

International audienceThe engineering of systems involves many different stakeholders, each with their own domain of expertise. Hence more and more organizations are adopting Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to allow domain experts to express solutions directly in terms of relevant domain concepts. This new trend raises new challenges about designing DSLs, evolving a set of DSLs and coordinating the use of multiple DSLs for both DSL designers and DSL users. This paper explores various dimensions of these challenges, and outlines a possible research roadmap for addressing them. The message of this paper is also to claim that if language engineering techniques to design any single (disposable) language are mature, the language engineering community needs to fundamentally change its view on software language design. We need to take the next step and adopt the perspective that a software language is, fundamentally, software too and thus the result of a composition of design decisions. These design decisions should be represented as first-class entities in the software languages workbench and it should be possible, during the language lifecycle, to add, remove and change language design decisions with limited effort to go from continuous design to continuous meta-design

Analysable software language translations

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaThe most difficult tasks in the Software Language Engineering (SLE) process, are the design of the semantics of a Domain Specific Modeling Language (DSML), its implementation (typically in a form of a compiler), and also its verification and validation. On the one hand, the choice of the appropriate level of abstraction when designing a DSML’s semantics, affects directly its usability, and the potential for its analysis. On the other hand, in practice, not only the compiler’s implementation, but also its verification and validation are performed manually, while having as reference the DSML’s semantic models. The challenge of this research work is to apply a complete model driven software development approach in the tasks of designing a DSML’s semantics, implementing, verifying and validating DSMLs’ compilers. This involves the choice of the most appropriate abstraction levels, and the design and development of adequate tools to support SLE practitioners on these tasks. This thesis reports: i) the design and implementation of formal languages (and associated tools) to support the task of DSML’s semantics design (i.e., DSLTrans and SOS); ii) the automatic generation of DSMLs’ compilers based on translation specifications; and iii) automated validation of DSMLs’ semantic designs based on the analysis of translation specifications. Finally, the approach presented in this thesis is illustrated with the design and implementation of a real life DSML

XPL:A language for modular homogeneous language embedding

Languages that are used for Software Language Engineering (SLE) offer a range of features that support the construction and deployment of new languages. SLE languages offer features for constructing and processing syntax and defining the semantics of language features. New languages may be embedded within an existing language (internal) or may be stand-alone (external). Modularity is a desirable SLE property for which there is no generally agreed approach. This article analyses the current tools for SLE and identifies the key features that are common. It then proposes a language called XPL that supports these features. XPL is higher-order and allows languages to be constructed and manipulated as first-class elements and therefore can be used to represent a range of approaches to modular language definition. This is validated by using XPL to define the notion of a language module that supports modular language construction and language transformation

Engineering a ROVER language in GEMOC STUDIO & MONTICORE: A comparison of language reuse support

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) improve engineering productivity through powerful abstractions and automation. To support the development of DSLs, the software language engineering (SLE) community has produced various solutions for the systematic engineering of DSLs that manifest in language workbenches. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the language workbenches GEMOC STUDIO and MONTICORE to the MDETools’17 ROVER challenge. To this effect, we refine the challenge’s requirements and show how GEMOC STUDIO and MONTICORE can be leveraged to engineer a Rover-specific DSL by reusing existing DSLs and tooling of GEMOC STUDIO and MONTICORE. Through this, we reflect on the SLE state of the art, detail capabilities of the two workbenches focusing particularly on language reuse support, and sketch how modelers can approach ROVER programming with modern modeling tools