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Semantics First!

Rethinking the Language Design Process

  • Conference paper
Software Language Engineering (SLE 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6940))

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Abstract

The design of languages is still more of an art than an engineering discipline. Although recently tools have been put forward to support the language design process, such as language workbenches, these have mostly focused on a syntactic view of languages. While these tools are quite helpful for the development of parsers and editors, they provide little support for the underlying design of the languages. In this paper we illustrate how to support the design of languages by focusing on their semantics first. Specifically, we will show that powerful and general language operators can be employed to adapt and grow sophisticated languages out of simple semantics concepts. We use Haskell as a metalanguage and will associate generic language concepts, such as semantics domains, with Haskell-specific ones, such as data types. We do this in a way that clearly distinguishes our approach to language design from the traditional syntax-oriented one. This will reveal some unexpected correlations, such as viewing type classes as language multipliers. We illustrate the viability of our approach with several real-world examples.

This work is partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under the grant FA9550-09-1-0229 and by the National Science Foundation under the grant CCF-0917092.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of EECS, Oregon State University, USA

    Martin Erwig & Eric Walkingshaw

Authors
  1. Martin Erwig
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  2. Eric Walkingshaw
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, 2109, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Anthony Sloane

  2. Fakultät Informatik, Institut für Software- und Multimediatechnik (SMT), Technische Universität Dresden, Nöthnitzer Straße 46, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Uwe Aßmann

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Erwig, M., Walkingshaw, E. (2012). Semantics First!. In: Sloane, A., Aßmann, U. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6940. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28830-2_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28829-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28830-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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