DSL : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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DSL

Digital Subscriber Line technology often called ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line technology. It is a way of using old telephone lines for high speed digital communications. It competes with cable for providing home Internet access.

DSL also stands for Domain Specific Language, a specialised language for dealing with a particular narrow class of problem. You can either create an entirely new language or embed it in an existing one. Embedding has the advantage of giving you the full power of the underlying language for extensions. Making it a separate language gives you greater freedom in designing the syntax.

The advantages of DSLs are:

Terser code. This makes it easier to see the forest for the trees. It makes maintenance easier. It makes bugs less likely.
Non programmers can often use the languages directly.
You are not locked into one vendor or platform. You can port your system and all your application code works identically and unmodified.

The main disadvantage of a DSL is reliance on someone who understands its inner workings, often less than perfectly documented. Examples include:

Abundance: data entry.
Ant: build, cross-platform scripting.
AWK: text manipulation with regular expressions.
GPSS: queue simulation.
JavaCC: parsing.
JESS: rule inference engine.
Ladder Logic: used in process control automation.
Martin Fowler’s Agreement language: invoices and payments.
MatLab: algebra and calculus.
PostScript: typesetting.
PUT language: language for describing how to do things, such as assemble a stereo system.
SQL: databases.
XML: wasting bandwidth

Most DSLs are much smaller, simpler and local than the examples I gave, and hence not well known. I wrote one called JCLGEN to simplify IBM mainframe JCL. I wrote another called QSL to efficiently collect statistics on queue simulations. I wrote Abundance to handle data entry and lookup.

ADSL
Canadian IAPs
Domain Specific Language Bibliography
IAP
naked DSL
transmission speed

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