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Domain-Specific Languages and Standardization: Friends or Foes?

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Book cover Domain Engineering

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) capture the domain knowledge through the constructs of the language, but making a good language takes more than combining a set of domain concepts in some random fashion. Creating a good language requires knowledge not only from the domain but also from the domain of language design. Generic abstraction concepts turn out to be useful for many different domains and thus for DSLs. In this chapter we discuss how DSLs can benefit from standardized generic languages to cope with abstraction needs. A successful combination will keep the DSL simple and its implementation maintainable while the generic language will add expressiveness and structuring means. We give examples of DSLs as well as general ones and use the examples to illustrate our advice on how to make a good language. We share experiences of language evolution and finally show an example of combining a generic language for variability with a DSL for train signaling.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.omg.org

  2. 2.

    http://www.omgwiki.org/model-interchange/doku.php

  3. 3.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/worldwide-market-share-smartphones-220747882--finance.html

  4. 4.

    http://mosis.reflector.os4os.org/modules/wikimod/

  5. 5.

    MSC Instance corresponds to UML Lifeline

  6. 6.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAST-ADL

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SINTEF, 124, Blindern, NO-0314, Oslo, Norway

    Øystein Haugen

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  1. Øystein Haugen
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Correspondence to Øystein Haugen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Iris Reinhartz-Berger

  2. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Dept. Information Systems Engineering, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Arnon Sturm

  3. Business Information Systems, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

    Tony Clark

  4. Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Sholom Cohen

  5. S23M, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Jorn Bettin

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Haugen, Ø. (2013). Domain-Specific Languages and Standardization: Friends or Foes?. In: Reinhartz-Berger, I., Sturm, A., Clark, T., Cohen, S., Bettin, J. (eds) Domain Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36654-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36654-3_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36654-3

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