Language composition untangled

by Sebastian Erdweg, Paolo G. Giarrusso, and Tillmann Rendel

In Proceedings of Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications (LDTA), pages 7:1–7:8. ACM Press, 2012.

Abstract

In language-oriented programming and modeling, software developers are largely concerned with the definition of domain-specific languages (DSLs) and their composition. While various implementation techniques and frameworks exist for defining DSLs, language composition has not obtained enough attention and is not well-enough understood. In particular, there is a lack of precise terminology for describing observations about language composition in theory and in existing language-development systems. To clarify the issue, we specify five forms of language composition: language extension, language restriction, language unification, self-extension, and extension composition. We illustrate this classification by various examples and apply it to discuss the performance of different language-development systems with respect to language composition. We hope that the terminology provided by our classification will enable more precise communication on language composition.

Citation as BibTeX

@inproceedings{erdweg12language,
  acmid = {2427055},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  articleno = {7},
  author = {Erdweg, Sebastian and Giarrusso, Paolo G. and Rendel, Tillmann},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications (LDTA)},
  doi = {10.1145/2427048.2427055},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-1536-4},
  nokeywords = {domain-specific language, language composition, language extension, language unification, self-extension},
  nolocation = {Tallinn, Estonia},
  numpages = {8},
  pages = {7:1–7:8},
  read = {1},
  noseries = {LDTA ’12},
  title = {Language composition untangled},
  year = {2012}
}