by

Frédéric Fondement

Do describe a system, for instance its requirements, specification, or implementation, one needs a language. Two kinds of languages are possible: either general purpose languages, or domain specific languages (DSL). In comparison to general purpose languages, DSLs are much smaller, i.e. they propose a limited set of concepts and are thus easier to learn, and focus on a specific class of concepts and a certain level of abstraction. Though many different DSLs are already available, their number grows dramatically. Indeed, the effort necessary to create a DSL is decreasing over time while language engineering techniques and tools appear. Those tools make possible to easily describe DSLs, create specifications (i.e. models) conforming to those DSLs, check well-formed rules over those models, exchange those models between tools, and make those models active by executing or compiling them into another language. This lecture, supported by practical sessions, will provide insights to some of those DSL techniques and tools.