[Haskell-cafe] Re: Designing a DSL?

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Günther Schmidt wrote:
> there are numerous examples on how to implement a DSL, but I haven't
> been able to figure out how to "design" one.
> 
> I mean I have a pretty good idea of the problem domain, I've coded it
> over and over again until I got it right. Now I'd like to express that
> part as a DSL instead of "hard coding" it as before so I can be more
> prepared if I need to change or amend it. Ideally I'd only have to
> change the interpreter, right?
> 
> And that I find to be the really tricky part, how do I *design* a DSL?

Since every well-designed DSL is, by definition, a unique experience,
it's hard to answer that question in general. I think that designing
DSLs in Haskell is best learned from the following classic papers

  John Hughes. The Design of a Pretty-printing Library.
  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.8777

  Philip Wadler. A prettier printer.
  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/
    language-design.html#prettier

  Richard Bird. A program to solve Sudoku
  Slides: http://icfp06.cs.uchicago.edu/bird-talk.pdf
  Paper: http://cs.tufts.decenturl.com/richard-bird-sudoku

  Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, Julian Seward.
  Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering.
  http://research.microsoft.decenturl.com/composing-contracts

and Hudak's book

  Paul Hudak. The Haskell School of Expression.
  http://www.haskell.org/soe/


The main principle is probably best summarized as: think long and hard
to make it as simple and beautiful as possible.


Regards,
apfelmus

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