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  • Book Overview & Buying Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition

By : Lorenzo Bettini
4.8 (6)
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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

4.8 (6)
By: Lorenzo Bettini

Overview of this book

Xtext is an open source Eclipse framework for implementing domain-specific languages together with IDE functionalities. It lets you implement languages really quickly; most of all, it covers all aspects of a complete language infrastructure, including the parser, code generator, interpreter, and more. This book will enable you to implement Domain Specific Languages (DSL) efficiently, together with their IDE tooling, with Xtext and Xtend. Opening with brief coverage of Xtext features involved in DSL implementation, including integration in an IDE, the book will then introduce you to Xtend as this language will be used in all the examples throughout the book. You will then explore the typical programming development workflow with Xtext when we modify the grammar of the DSL. Further, the Xtend programming language (a fully-featured Java-like language tightly integrated with Java) will be introduced. We then explain the main concepts of Xtext, such as validation, code generation, and customizations of runtime and UI aspects. You will have learned how to test a DSL implemented in Xtext with JUnit and will progress to advanced concepts such as type checking and scoping. You will then integrate the typical Continuous Integration systems built in to Xtext DSLs and familiarize yourself with Xbase. By the end of the book, you will manually maintain the EMF model for an Xtext DSL and will see how an Xtext DSL can also be used in IntelliJ.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
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Preface to the second edition
14
14. Conclusions
15
A. Bibliography
16
Index

Forward references

You should know by now that parsing is only the first stage when implementing a DSL and that it cannot detect all the errors from the programs. We need to implement additional checks in a validator.

One important thing we need to check in our Expressions DSL is that an expression does not refer to a variable defined after the very expression. Using an identifier before its declaration is usually called a forward reference.

Therefore, this program should not be considered valid:

var i = j + 1
var j = 0

Since the initialization expression of i refers to j, which is defined after. Of course, this is a design choice. Since we want to interpret the expressions, it makes sense to interpret them in the order they are defined.

This strategy also avoids possible mutual dependency problems:

var i = j + 1
var j = i + 1

A variable which is initialized referring to itself is a special case of the preceding:

var i = i + 1

We want to avoid this because our interpreter would enter an endless...

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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
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