Functional programming for domain-specific languages

Abstract

Domain-specific languages are a popular application area for functional programming; and conversely, functional programming is a popular implementation vehicle for domain-specific languages-at least, for embedded ones. Why is this? The appeal of embedded domain-specific languages is greatly enhanced by the presence of convenient lightweight tools for defining, implementing, and optimising new languages; such tools represent one of functional programming’s strengths. In these lectures we discuss functional programming techniques for embedded domainspecific languages; we focus especially on algebraic datatypes and higherorder functions, and their influence on deep and shallow embeddings.