Language-oriented programming (LOP) is a software-development paradigm where "language" is a software building block with the same status as objects, modules and components, and rather than solving problems in

general-purpose programming language In computer software, a general-purpose programming language (GPL) is a programming language for building software in a wide variety of application domains. Conversely, a domain-specific programming language is used within a specific area. For exam ...

s, the programmer creates one or more

domain-specific language A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging ...

s (DSLs) for the problem first, and solves the problem in those languages. Language-oriented programming was first described in detail in Martin Ward's 1994 paper ''Language Oriented Programming'', published in ''Software - Concepts and Tools'', Vol.15, No.4, pp 147–161, 1994.

Concept

The concept of language-oriented programming takes the approach to capture requirements in the user's terms, and then to try to create an implementation language as

isomorphic In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word i ...

as possible to the user's descriptions, so that the mapping between requirements and implementation is as direct as possible. A measure of the closeness of this isomorphism is the "redundancy" of the language, defined as the number of editing operations needed to implement a stand-alone change in requirements. It is not assumed ''a-priori'' what is the best language for implementing the new language. Rather, the developer can choose among options created by analysis of the information flows — what information is acquired, what its structure is, when it is acquired, from whom, and what is done with it.

Development

The Racket programming language is designed to support language-oriented programming. Other

language workbench A language workbench is a tool or set of tools that enables software development in the language-oriented programming software development paradigm. A language workbench will typically include tools to support the definition, reuse and composition ...

tools such as

JetBrains MPS JetBrains MPS (Meta Programming System) is a language workbench developed by JetBrains. MPS is a tool to design domain-specific languages (DSL). It uses projectional editing which allows users to overcome the limits of language parsers, and buil ...

, Kermeta, or

Xtext Xtext is an open-source software framework for developing programming languages and domain-specific languages (DSLs). Unlike standard parser generators, Xtext generates not only a parser, but also a class model for the abstract syntax tree, as ...

provide the tools to design and implement DSLs and language-oriented programming

References

{{Reflist

External links

Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm
Sergey Dmitriev's paper that further explored the topic.
Language Oriented Programming in MetaLisp
Gyuri Lajos'
thesis 1992 University of Leeds
The system used the very same Top Down Parsing Language algorithm that powered Tree-Meta Programming paradigms

Concept

Development

See also

References

External links