MontiCore: a Framework for Compositional Development of Domain Specific Languages

TL;DR

This paper presents MontiCore, a framework that facilitates the modular and compositional development of domain-specific languages (DSLs) with enhanced syntax and tool support, simplifying language extension and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for modular DSL development using grammar inheritance and embedding, with a focus on syntax clarity and tool support for evolving languages.

Findings

Modular language definitions improve development efficiency.

Compositional techniques enable easier language extension.

Enhanced syntax concepts support complex language structures.

Abstract

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly used today. Coping with complex language definitions, evolving them in a structured way, and ensuring their error freeness are the main challenges of DSL design and implementation. The use of modular language definitions and composition operators are therefore inevitable in the independent development of language components. In this article, we discuss these arising issues by describing a framework for the compositional development of textual DSLs and their supporting tools. We use a redundance-free definition of a readable concrete syntax and a comprehensible abstract syntax as both representations significantly overlap in their structure. For enhancing the usability of the abstract syntax, we added concepts like associations and inheritance to a grammar- based definition in order to build up arbitrary graphs (as known from metamodeling). Two modularity concepts, grammar inheritance and embedding, are discussed. They permit compositional language definition and thus simplify the extension of languages based on already existing ones. We demonstrate that compositional engineering of new languages is a useful concept when project-individual DSLs with appropriate tool support are defined.