Thorn language: a flexible tool for code generation

This paper presents a new approach to domainspecific languages creation. Instead of defining both language syntax and semantics for each case, the same general-purposed markup language Thorn is used. The original model of translation associates commands inside a Thorn document with programs written in some script language. When the compiler needs to execute a command, it launches a corresponding program, passes data from the document to the program, and uses an output value of the program as the result of the command. We describe an approach to code generation based on Thorn, and compare the approach to other known code generation methods. We give various examples of Thorn-based code generators.