DMCA
Development of Internal Domain-Specific Languages: Design Principles and Design Patterns
| Citations: | 2 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Günther_developmentof,
author = {Sebastian Günther},
title = {Development of Internal Domain-Specific Languages: Design Principles and Design Patterns},
year = {}
}
Share
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
OpenURL
Abstract
A great part of software development challenges can be solved by one universal tool: Abstraction. Developers solve development challenges by using expressions and concepts that abstract from too technical details. One especially supportive tool for abstraction are domain-specific languages (DSLs). DSLs are specifically crafted languages that support abstraction in two ways. On the one side, they abstract from the (real-world) concepts of the domain by introducing objects with structure and behavior that are representative for the domain. On the other side, they abstract from a programming language and do not depend on hardware-specific details. We focus on internal DSLs, which are build on top of an existing host language. Such DSLs can completely use the development tools of their host, are quick to build because they reuse existing abstractions, and can be easily integrated with other programs, libraries, and DSLs of the same host. This paper’s contribution is a set of six DSL design principles and a catalog of DSL design patterns. We differentiate into three types of patterns: Foundation patterns, which provide a DSL’s basic objects and operations, notation patterns, which provide the overall layout of the DSL and help to design individual expressions, and abstractions patterns, which help to implement the domain-specific abstractions. Each pattern identifies a development context, design goals that support the design principles, a general solution and a concrete example. To show the applicability of our research results, we document the pattern utilization in 12 other DSLs for the selected host languages Ruby, Python, and Scala. Finally we extend the patterns towards a pattern language by detailing the relationships between the patterns and by showing how other patterns can be incorporated with our patterns. A Note to the Reader
Keyphrases
design principle internal domain-specific language design pattern domain-specific abstraction development context abstraction pattern universal tool general solution domain-specific language individual expression supportive tool technical detail software development challenge great part support abstraction programming language host language internal dsl pattern language dsl design pattern host language ruby foundation pattern overall layout research result dsl basic object pattern utilization hardware-specific detail notation pattern dsl design principle development tool design goal development challenge paper contribution concrete example
