Type Systems for Domain-specific Languages

Abstract: Model-driven software development employs models to describe different aspects of a system on different levels of abstraction. These aspects are driven by tech-nology or application domain. Modeling is often done in specific graphical or textual notations, called domain-specific languages (DSL). In recent years such languages be-came very popular in the modeling community to describe structure and sometimes be-havior. In the context of type systems, these structures are called types and the behavior is modeled with expressions. The programming language community has developed many concepts to model and specify type systems and the semantics of expressions. However, in the modeling community this is often neglected when specifying meta models and describing their semantics, what may cause problems in developing checks and generators for DSLs. To address this issue, we present an approach, that provides guidance and support during DSL development based on established knowledge on type systems and generator construction, to ease the integration of type systems in DSL. We evaluate this approach with the Xtext language engineering framework.