A Library of Literals, Expressions, Types, and Statements for Compositional Language Design.

Abstract

Many modeling languages share common concepts, such as types, expressions, statements, or literals. Nonetheless, these essential language concerns are often developed again and again, independently, and with minor changes here and there. A well-designed and extensible library of such, tried-and-tested, language components can facilitate engineering new languages through their reuse. We utilize the powerful language composition techniques of the MontiCore language workbench to conceive such a library, present its components, and their rationale. This fosters language engineering in MontiCore and can inspire more efficient language engineering in the technological spaces of other language workbenches.

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

“…By default, the language component definition does not distinguish different kinds of artifacts that contribute specific parts to the language, such as a grammar file or a context condition class. Related language component definitions (Butting, Eikermann, et al 2020) often rely on such concrete artifact kinds (e.g., a grammar file) or describe a language in terms of the conceptual contributions that these artifacts make (e.g., abstract syntax). However, these definitions are often highly specific to a certain technological space and are still not detailed enough to properly describe language composition.…”

“…Therefore, each instance of the specific classifiers naturally inherits the properties of the UseCase classifier. Newly configured attributes in the inherited stereotype with the same name as that of the base language element are distinguished internally using unique identifiers to eliminate problems of multiple inheritance (Butting, Eikermann, et al 2020). For example, if an instance of MyFirstUseCase has an attribute named attribute1, then attribute1 of MyFirstUseCase can be configured via the Properties tab of the Specification configuration window of the model element in MagicDraw.…”

“…Previous work on compositional reusable language design (Butting, Eikermann, et al 2020;Gupta et al 2021) for both MontiCore and MagicDraw was evaluated. We note that the realization part of our study is currently tool-specific or vendorlocked.…”

“…Compositional modeling aspects described in (Broy & Rumpe 2007; detail modular aspects in interacting systems. Compositional approaches consider not only the modeling language but the models, their respective software components, and their artifacts as well (Talcott et al 2021;Butting, Eikermann, et al 2020). These approaches are well described in the textual technological space Butting, Pfeiffer, et al 2020;Hölldobler et al 2018) with consideration for the different forms of language composition.…”