A Catalog of Design Patterns for Compositional Language Engineering.

Abstract

When composing a domain-specific language from several language components, it is also necessary to compose analysis and synthesis techniques, which are individually defined on these components in an efficient, ideally black-box form.An effective way of allowing such compositions is to use specific design patterns, which are partly reflected in the tooling code, partly reflected in the language, but also partly reflected in the language workbench (one meta-level higher), and the generated/synthesized product code (one meta-level downward). Based on the experiences gained in compositional language development using the language workbench MontiCore, we in detail discuss several of those design patterns, namely the Mill, the RealThis object composition, the Template/Hook, and the TOP-Generator Patterns, and the hidden complexity of an extended visitor infrastructure coping with the above patterns. The patterns are recorded and described in a reusable way, as usual, allowing readers to participate from the gained insights and possible solutions.

Modular language product lines: concept, tool and analysis

“…Our modular approach enables decomposing a language family into features, and describing the family as a product line of modules. Still, mechanisms facilitating its use in practice are required, including design guidelines (e.g., akin to [19], but in our setting), refactorings (as hinted at in Sect. 6.1), or techniques to reverse-engineer a set of language variants into an LPL (in the style of [47]).…”

Towards Modular Development of Reusable Language Components for Domain-Specific Modeling Languages in the MagicDraw and MontiCore Ecosystems.

“…The implementation of modularisation and composition concepts with MPS have been researched (Voelter 2011), and it is based on a projectional editor. Although possibilities to combine the development of languages in two technological spaces exist, e.g., integration of a textual syntax inside a graphical modeling tool (Drux, Jansen, Rumpe, & Schmalzing 2022;Seidewitz 2014), often the creation of such supplementary units is tedious, homogeneous, horizontal, or vertical and only provides a loose relation to our study. An example is the embedding of generated eclipse modeling framework (EMF) based textual editors and eclipse graphical modeling framework (GMF) based graphical editors with tree-based editors that are generated with EMF (Scheidgen 2008).…”