Tony Clark, Paul Sammut, James Willans
The aim of this book is to introduce the language XMF. This is done by defining the language, providing some examples of applications that can be written directly in the XOCL language that comes with XMF, and then by showing how XMF can be used for language engineering. The main focus of this book is on language engineering by example.
Tony Clark, Paul Sammut, James Willans
Modern day system developers have some serious problems to contend with. The systems they develop are becoming increasingly complex as customers demand richer functionality delivered in ever shorter timescales. They have to manage a huge diversity of implementation technologies, design techniques and development processes: everything from scripting languages to web-services to the latest 'silver bullet' design abstraction. To add to that, nothing stays still: today's 'must have' technology rapidly becomes tomorrow's legacy problem that must be managed along with everything else. How can these problems be dealt with? In this book we propose that there is a common foundation to their resolution: languages. Languages are the primary way in which system developers communicate, design and implement systems. Languages provide abstractions that can encapsulate complexity, embrace the diversity of technologies and design abstractions, and unite modern and legacy systems.