Reuseware - Adding Modularity to Your Language of Choice

2007 research paper

In Proc. of TOOLS EUROPE 2007: Object, Models, Components and Patterns, volume vol. 6, no. 9 of Journal of Object Technology, ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
with: Jakob Henriksson, Steffen Zschaler, and Uwe Aßmann

The trend towards domain-specific languages leads to an ever-growing plethora of highly specialized languages. Developers of such languages focus on their specific domains rather than on technical challenges of language design. Generic features of languages are rarely included in special-purpose languages. One very important feature is modularization, the ability to formulate partial programs in separate entities, composable into a complete program in a defined manner. This paper presents a generic approach for adding modularity to arbitrary languages, discussing the underlying concepts and presenting the Reuseware Composition Framework. We walk through an example based on Xcerpt, a Semantic Web query language.