Zekai Demirezen. Semantic framework for DSLs. In Shail Arora, Gary T. Leavens, editors, Companion to the 24th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2009, October 25-29, 2009, Orlando, Florida, USA. pages 833-834, ACM, 2009. [doi]
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) enable domain experts to participate in software development tasks and to specify their own programs using domain abstractions. To define programs using domain concepts, rather than programming language concepts, model-based syntax and semantic specification techniques may offer advantages over current approaches. The purpose of the research described in this paper is to provide a semantic framework that can be used visually by DSL designers, yet has formal underpinnings such that interoperation with verification tools is possible to realize model checking tasks. This research is focused on a visual technique based on activity diagrams and graph transformation rules to define the semantics of DSLs.