Managing the Coupled Evolution of Metamodels and Textual Concrete Syntax Specifications

Abstract

In the context of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) the definition of a Domain Specific Modeling Language (DSML) consists of a set of coordinated artifacts specifying the abstract and concrete syntax of the language, and possibly further aspects related to semantics. Concerning the specification of concrete syntaxes a number of tools are available. They typically permit to associate syntactic elements to metamodel (abstract syntax) of the modeling language being developed and to generate a number of supporting tools (e.g., parsers, pretty printers, and editors). Currently, tools for the specification of textual concrete syntaxes lack support for propagating metamodel changes to the corresponding concrete syntax specifications. In this paper, we analyze such a co-evolution problem, and provide an approach able to automate the propagation of metamodel changes to textual concrete specifications given by means of the TCS tool. The approach relies on model-to-model transformations which are applied according to difference models which represent the occurred metamodel changes.