About Mohamed Sanaulla
In my previous post quite sometime back I had written about Internal DSLs using Java. In the book Domain Specific Languages by Martin Fowler, he discusses about another type of DSL called external DSLs in which the DSL is written in another language which is then parsed by the host language to populate the semantic model.
In the previous example I was discussing about creating a DSL for defining a graph. The advantage of using an external dsl is that any change in the graph data would not require recompilation of the program instead the program can just load the external dsl, create a parse tree and then populate the semantic model. The semantic model will remain the same and the advantage of using the semantic model is that one can make modification to the DSL without making much changes to the semantic model. In the example between Internal DSLs and external DSLs I have not modified the semantic model. To create an external DSL I am making use of ANTLR.
What is ANTLR?
The definition as given on the official site is:
Source : http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/07/creating-external-dsls-using-antlr-and-java.html
