From a program family to a domain-specific language

Abstract

An increasing number of domain-specific languages (DSLs) are being developed and successfully used in a variety of areas including networking, telecommunications and financial products. Yet, the development of a DSL is still an obscure process and its assessment is often partial. This paper proposes to structure the development of a DSL on the notion of program family. We outline the main steps of such development. Furthermore, we argue that a program family provides a basis to assess a DSL. The ideas discussed in this paper are directly based on our experience in developing DSLs for various domains and studying existing ones. We illustrate these ideas with various examples of DSLs.