Language Boxes

As domain-specific modeling begins to attract widespread acceptance, pressure is increasing for the development of new domainspecific languages. Unfortunately these DSLs typically conflict with the grammar of the host language, making it difficult to compose hybrid code except at the level of strings; few mechanisms (if any) exist to control the scope of usage of multiple DSLs; and, most seriously, existing host language tools are typically unaware of the DSL extensions, thus hampering the development process. Language boxes address these issues by offering a simple, modular mechanism to encapsulate (i) compositional changes to the host language, (ii) transformations to address various concerns such as compilation and syntax highlighting, and (iii) scoping rules to control visibility of fine-grained language extensions. We describe the design and implementation of language boxes, and show with the help of several examples how modular extensions can be introduced to a host language...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SLE
• Authors: Lukas Renggli, Marcus Denker, Oscar Nierstrasz
• Keywords: Host Language, Host Language Tools, Language Boxes, SLE 2009, Software Engineering