Software meta-language engineering and CBS
The SLE conference series is devoted to the engineering principles of software languages: their design, their implementation, and their evolution. This paper is about the role of language specification in SLE. A precise specification of a software language needs to be written in a formal meta-langua...
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| Published in: | Journal of computer languages (Online) Vol. 50; pp. 39 - 48 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier Ltd
01.02.2019
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| Subjects: | |
| ISSN: | 2590-1184, 2590-1184 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The SLE conference series is devoted to the engineering principles of software languages: their design, their implementation, and their evolution. This paper is about the role of language specification in SLE. A precise specification of a software language needs to be written in a formal meta-language, and it needs to co-evolve with the specified language. Moreover, different software languages often have features in common, which should provide opportunities for reuse of parts of language specifications. Support for co-evolution and reuse in a meta-language requires careful engineering of its design.
The author has been involved in the development of several meta-languages for semantic specification, including action semantics and modular variants of structural operational semantics (MSOS, I-MSOS). This led to the PLanCompS project, and to the design of its meta-language, CBS, for component-based semantics. CBS comes together with an extensible library of reusable components called ‘funcons’, corresponding to fundamental programming constructs. The main aim of CBS is to optimise co-evolution and reuse of specifications during language development, and to make specification of language semantics almost as straightforward as context-free syntax specification.
The paper discusses the engineering of a selection of previous meta-languages, assessing how well they support co-evolution and reuse. It then gives an introduction to CBS, and illustrates significant features. It also considers whether other current meta-languages might also be used to define an extensible library of funcons for use in component-based semantics. |
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| ISSN: | 2590-1184 2590-1184 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jvlc.2018.11.003 |