Abstract
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are often classified into external and internal DSLs. An external DSL is a stand-alone language with its own parser. An internal DSL is an extension of an existing programming language, the host language, offering the user of the DSL domain-specific constructs as well as the constructs of the host language, thus providing a richer language than the DSL itself. In this paper we report on experiences implementing external as well as internal formal modeling DSLs with the Scala programming language, known in particular for its support for defining DSLs. The modeling languages include monitoring logics, a testing language, and a general purpose SysML inspired modeling language. We present a systematic overview of advantages and disadvantages of each option.
Part of the work was supported by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (kaken-hi grants 23240003 and 26280019), and by NSF Grant CCF-0926190. Part of the work was carried out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Notes
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- 2.
A case class in Scala is like a class with the additional properties that it supports pattern matching over objects of the class, that the new keyword is not needed to create objects of the class, and equality is pre-defined based on the arguments.
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A trait in Scala is a module concept closely related to the notion of an abstract class, as for example found in Java. Traits, however, differ by allowing a more flexible way of composition called mixin composition, an alternative to multiple inheritance.
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The apply method in Scala has special interpretation: if an object O defines a such, it can be applied to a list of arguments using function application syntax: O(...), equivalent to calling the apply method: O.apply(...).
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Artho, C., Havelund, K., Kumar, R., Yamagata, Y. (2015). Domain-Specific Languages with Scala. In: Butler, M., Conchon, S., Zaïdi, F. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_1
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