Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Development of Domain Specific Languages with MontiCore
C. Berger, M. Breuer, H. Grönniger, A. Haber,
C. Herrmann, H. Krahn, C. Pinkernell, H. Rendel,
B. Rumpe, M. Schindler, G. Volkova, S. Völkel, and I. Weisemöller
C. A. Arikan, A. Döring, S. Gottschalk, U. Helker,
K. Hölldobler, T. Kutz, and C. Oppitz
Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have recently become increasingly important for
software developers and tool builders in several areas of application. Object oriented
programming, which has been the most important programming paradigm since the 1990s, is
supplemented by methods and languages that are tailored to a specific domain. The growing
number and complexity of such languages is accompanied by the need to develop DSLs
efficiently and to reuse artifacts from previous language development processes.
The MontiCore Framework allows for efficient, agile, modular, and compositional
development of languages and tools as well as for the combination of DSLs and general
purpose languages (GPLs) as shown in Figure 2. It supports an integrated definition of the
concrete and the abstract syntax of languages and language modules, and the automatic
generation of language processing infrastructure such as lexers and parsers. It also allows for
efficient development model analysis and for development of code generators.
Figure 2: Compositional Development of Languages with MontiCore
Major improvements during the last term include the support of symbol table construction and
support for the implementation of code generators. Moreover, we have applied substantial
structural changes to the project as well as some technical improvements. The aforementioned
features and compliance to the wide spread Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) are the most
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