From DSL specification to interactive computer programming environment

Abstract

The adoption of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) relies on the capacity of language workbenches to automate the development of advanced and customized environments. While DSLs are usually well tailored for the main scenarios, the cost of developing mature tools prevents the ability to develop additional capabilities for alternative scenarios targeting specific tasks (e.g., API testing) or stakeholders (e.g., education). In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate interactive computer programming environments from existing specifications of textual interpreted DSLs. The approach provides abstractions to complement the DSL specification, and combines static analysis and language transformations to automate the transformation of the language syntax, the execution state and the execution semantics. We evaluate the approach over a representative set of DSLs, and demonstrate the ability to automatically transform a textual syntax to load partial programs limited to a single statement, and to derive a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) from the specification of a language interpreter.