A Domain-Specific Language for Programming in the Tile Assembly Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a domain-specific language designed to simplify the creation of tile sets for the Tile Assembly Model, enabling easier, error-reduced, and visually supported programming of complex tile configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a new DSL with tile templates and operations, implemented as a Python library, to streamline tile set creation and support visual editing tools.

Findings

Reduces manual errors in tile set creation

Enables programmatic and visual design of tile configurations

Facilitates large and complex tile set development

Abstract

We introduce a domain-specific language (DSL) for creating sets of tile types for simulations of the abstract Tile Assembly Model. The language defines objects known as tile templates, which represent related groups of tiles, and a small number of basic operations on tile templates that help to eliminate the error-prone drudgery of enumerating such tile types manually or with low-level constructs of general-purpose programming languages. The language is implemented as a class library in Python (a so-called internal DSL), but is presented independently of Python or object-oriented programming, with emphasis on supporting the creation of visual editing tools for programmatically creating large sets of complex tile types without needing to write a program.