DSL development based on target meta-models. Using AST transformations for automating semantic analysis in a textual DSL framework

This paper describes an approach to creating textual syntax for Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). We consider target meta-model to be the main artifact and hence to be developed first. The key idea is to represent analysis of textual syntax as a sequence of transformations. This is made by explicit operations on abstract syntax trees (ATS), for which a simple language is proposed. Text-to-model transformation is divided into two parts: text-to-AST (developed by openArchitectureWare [1]) and AST-to-model (proposed by this paper). Our approach simplifies semantic analysis and helps to generate as much as possible.