iCoLa: A Compositional Meta-language with Support for Incremental Language Development

Abstract

Programming languages providing high-level abstractions can increase programmers’ productivity and program safety. Language-oriented programming is a paradigm in which domain-specific languages are developed to solve problems within specific domains with (high-level) abstractions relevant to those domains. However, language development involves complex design and engineering processes. These processes can be simplified by reusing (parts of) existing languages and by offering language-parametric tooling.

In this paper we present iCoLa, a meta-language supporting incremental (meta-)programming based on reusable components. In our implementation of iCoLa, languages are first-class citizens, providing the full power of the host-language (Haskell) to compose and manipulate languages. We demonstrate iCoLa through the construction of the Imp, SIMPLE, and MiniJava languages via the composition and restriction of language fragments and demonstrate the variability of our approach through the construction of several languages using a fixed-set of operators.