Meta-Packages: Painless Domain Specific Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces meta-packages, a meta-modelling approach that simplifies the creation and processing of domain-specific languages by using a standard, package-based meta-language, enhancing flexibility and tooling compatibility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel meta-packaging approach for DSLs, enabling standard, flexible, and easily adaptable language definitions compared to existing methods.

Findings

Meta-packages facilitate defining diverse DSLs in a standard way.

Existing tooling can be adapted easily to new languages using meta-packages.

The approach addresses limitations of current DSL design methods.

Abstract

Domain Specific Languages are used to provide a tailored modelling notation for a specific application domain. There are currently two main approaches to DSLs: standard notations that are tailored by adding simple properties; new notations that are designed from scratch. There are problems with both of these approaches which can be addressed by providing access to a small meta-language based on packages and classes. A meta-modelling approach based on meta-packages allows a wide range of DSLs to be defined in a standard way. The DSLs can be processed using standard object-based extension at the meta-level and existing tooling can easily be defined to adapt to the new languages. This paper introduces the concept of meta-packages and provides a simple example.