Amalgamation of domain specific languages with behaviour

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) become more useful the more specific they are to a particular domain. The resulting need for developing a substantial number of DSLs can only be satisfied if DSL development can be made as efficient as possible. One way in which to address this challenge is by enabling the reuse of (partial) DSLs in the construction of new DSLs. Reuse of DSLs builds on two foundations: a notion of DSL composition and theoretical results ensuring the safeness of composing DSLs with respect to the semantics of the component DSLs.Given a graph-grammar formalisation of DSLs, in this paper, we build on graph transformation system morphisms to define parameterised DSLs and their instantiation by an amalgamation construction. Results on the protection of the behaviour along the induced morphisms allow us to safely reuse and combine definitions of DSLs to build more complex ones. We illustrate our proposal in e-Motions for a DSL for production-line systems and three independent DSLs for describing non-functional properties, namely response time, throughput, and failure rate.