Eelco Visser. Separation of concerns in language definition. In Walter Binder, Erik Ernst, Achille Peternier, Robert Hirschfeld, editors, 13th International Conference on Modularity, MODULARITY '14, Lugano, Switzerland, April 22-26, 2014. pages 1-2, ACM, 2014. [doi]
Effectively applying linguistic abstraction to emerging domains of computation requires the ability to rapidly develop software languages. However, a software language is a complex software system in its own right and can take significant effort to design and implement. We are currently investigating a radical separation of concerns in language definition by designing high-level declarative meta-languages specialized to the various concerns of language definition that can be used as the single source of production quality (incremental) semantic operations and as a model for reasoning about language properties.