A preliminary study on various implementation approaches of domain-specific language

• Autores: Tomaz Kosar, Pablo E. Martínez López, Pablo A. Barrientos, Marjan Mernik
• Localización: Information and software technology, ISSN 0950-5849, Vol. 50, Nº 5, 2008, págs. 390-405
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Various implementation approaches for developing a domain-specific language are available in literature. There are certain common beliefs about the advantages/disadvantages of these approaches. However, it is hard to be objective and speak in favor of a particular one, since these implementation approaches are normally compared over diverse application domains.

    The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical results from ten diverse implementation approaches for domain-specific languages, but conducted using the same representative language. Comparison shows that these discussed approaches differ in terms of the effort need to implement them, however, the effort needed by a programmer to implement a domain-specific language should not be the only factor taken into consideration. Another important factor is the effort needed by an end-user to rapidly write correct programs using the produced domain-specific language. Therefore, this paper also provides empirical results on end-user productivity, which is measured as the lines of code needed to express a domain-specific program, similarity to the original notation, and how error-reporting and debugging are supported in a given implementation.