Hi all,
for people that have followed my posts on the DSL subject this question
probably will seem strange, especially asking it now.
I have read quite a lot lately on the subject, most of it written by the
great old ones, (come on guys you know whom I mean :)).
What I could gather from their papers was, that a DSL is basically
something entirely abstract as such, ie. it allows you build and combine
expressions in a language which is specific for your problem domain.
Irregardless of further details on how to do that, and there are quite a
few, the crux as such is that they are abstract of "meaning".
The meaning depends how you *evaluate* the expression, which can be in
more than merely one way, which is where, as far as I understand it, the
true power lies.
So, you might wonder, since I figured it out this far, why ask what a DSL
is?
Because out there I see quite a lot of stuff that is labeled as DSL, I
mean for example packages on hackage, quite useuful ones too, where I
don't see the split of assembling an expression tree from evaluating it,
to me that seems more like combinator libraries.
Thus:
What is a DSL?
Günther
