Incremental Concrete Syntax for Embedded Languages

Embedded domain-specifi�c languages (EDSLs) are known to improve the productivity of developers. However, for many domains no DSL implementation is available. Two important reasons are: First, the e�ort to implement embedded DSLs that provide the domain's established syntax (called concrete syntax ) is very high. Second, the embedded DSL and its underlying general-purpose programming language (GPL) are typically tightly integrated which hampers reusability across di�erent GPLs. In this paper, we present an approach that signi�cantly reduces the necessary e�ort to implement embedded DSLs with concrete syntax. The idea is to use island grammars to specify the EDSL's concrete syntax. This enables the developer to implement the embedded DSL as a library and to incrementally specify the concrete syntax using meta-data. Only those parts of the EDSL's grammar need to be specified �ed that deviate from the grammar of the GPL and which is required to enable the integration with the GPL