Reply To: DSLs

[Lee Riemenschneider]

Hello Toni,

How does a DSL come to exist? Does it need anything more than a domain analysis?

Wikipedia says “A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain.” [Wikipedia]

Martin Fowler says, “DSLs are small languages, focused on a particular aspect of a software system.”, and Stephen Mellor has referred to domains as aspects.

I think the interfaces of an xtUML/Shlaer-Mellor domain and the domain-specific data types are basically a DSL. Again, I don’t have familiarity with using DSLs (per typical definition), but when they first started coming out I thought they looked awfully familiar.