Controlled and Extensible Variability of Concrete and Abstract Syntax with Independent Language Features

Abstract

ABSTRACT"Software languages are software too", hence their creation, evolution, and maintenance is subject to the same challenges. Managing multiple stand-alone variants of similar DSLs raises the related maintenance and evolution efforts for the languages and their associated tooling (analyses, transformations, editors, etc.) to a higher power. Software variability management techniques can help to harness this complexity. Research in software language variability focuses on metamodels and consequently mainly supports managing the variability of abstract syntaxes, omitting concrete syntax variability management. We present an approach to manage controlled syntactic variability of extensible software language product lines through identification of dedicated syntax variation points and specification of variants from independently developed features. This fosters software language reuse and reduces creation, maintenance, and evolution efforts. The approach is realized with the MontiCore language workbench and evaluated through a case study on architecture description languages. It facilitates creating, maintaining, and evolving the concrete and abstract syntax of families of languages and, hence, reduces the effort of software language engineering.

Towards a recipe for language decomposition: quality assessment of language product lines

“…Monticore supports language embedding and language inheritance for compositional development of language families. Butting et al (2018) presented an approach to manage syntactic variability of extensible LPLs using Monticore. Spoofax supports generation of a wide variety of IDE tools for Eclipse and IntelliJ.…”

“…Successful product line engineering requires the definition of highly cohesive features with low coupling as any other kind of software engineering (Parnas 1971;Troy and Zweben 1981;Macro and Buxton 1987;Fenton 1991;Lanza and Marinescu 2006). Researchers are focusing on the development of integrated development environments (IDEs) which provide tools supporting LPLs system designer, the systematic derivation of sound language definitions and implementations (Visser et al 2014) and the automatic generation of IDE services and debugging (Butting et al 2018;Kühn et al 2019;Favalli et al 2020). Modern language workbenches do not directly address a formal specification for the quality in the design of language features, especially with respect to their modularity flaws.…”

Extensible and modular abstract syntax for feature modeling based on language constructs

“…To tackle this problem, recent studies [60,62] are proposing the use of extensible and modular language designs in terms of language levels that allow deciding what part of the language we want to keep and use. In domain-specific languages (DSLs) (e.g., MontiCore [21], NIVEL [6]), language constructs are defined in separated models with extension points. Then, a language is defined as the composition of several language constructs.…”