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International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods

ICFEM 2015: Formal Methods and Software Engineering pp 1–16Cite as

Domain-Specific Languages with Scala

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9407))

Abstract

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are often classified into external and internal DSLs. An external DSL is a stand-alone language with its own parser. An internal DSL is an extension of an existing programming language, the host language, offering the user of the DSL domain-specific constructs as well as the constructs of the host language, thus providing a richer language than the DSL itself. In this paper we report on experiences implementing external as well as internal formal modeling DSLs with the Scala programming language, known in particular for its support for defining DSLs. The modeling languages include monitoring logics, a testing language, and a general purpose SysML inspired modeling language. We present a systematic overview of advantages and disadvantages of each option.

Part of the work was supported by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (kaken-hi grants 23240003 and 26280019), and by NSF Grant CCF-0926190. Part of the work was carried out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The standard Scala library [26] originally included a parser combinator package. However, because it is rarely used, it was moved to an external library [24].

  2. 2.

    A case class in Scala is like a class with the additional properties that it supports pattern matching over objects of the class, that the new keyword is not needed to create objects of the class, and equality is pre-defined based on the arguments.

  3. 3.

    A trait in Scala is a module concept closely related to the notion of an abstract class, as for example found in Java. Traits, however, differ by allowing a more flexible way of composition called mixin composition, an alternative to multiple inheritance.

  4. 4.

    The apply method in Scala has special interpretation: if an object O defines a such, it can be applied to a list of arguments using function application syntax: O(...), equivalent to calling the apply method: O.apply(...).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. AIST, Amagasaki, Japan

    Cyrille Artho & Yoriyuki Yamagata

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Klaus Havelund & Rahul Kumar

Authors
  1. Cyrille Artho
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  2. Klaus Havelund
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  3. Rahul Kumar
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  4. Yoriyuki Yamagata
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cyrille Artho .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

    Michael Butler

  2. Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France

    Sylvain Conchon

  3. Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France

    Fatiha Zaïdi

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Artho, C., Havelund, K., Kumar, R., Yamagata, Y. (2015). Domain-Specific Languages with Scala. In: Butler, M., Conchon, S., Zaïdi, F. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25423-4_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25422-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25423-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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