The deployment of Domain Speciﬁc Languages (DSL) and in particular Domain Spe-ciﬁc Modeling Languages (DSML) is becoming more and more prominent in variousdomains. In order to cope with the complexity of the realization of DSLs, common andwell-established methods of software engineering such as modularization and reuseneed to be adapted and applied for DSLs. This has already been noted in [2] when theemerging DSL era was still closely akin to compiler theory.As stated in this work, compositionality of DSLs can take place at several dimen-sions. Various contributions in thisﬁeldofongoingresearch reﬂectthisandonlyabriefoverview is given below. One form of DSL composition is the syntactic embeddingsuch as embedding DSLs in GPLs as described in [3,4]. In [5] a family of DSMLs areused for the generation of web information systems. There the composition is carriedout via the joint usage of several languages each with their own artifacts and hence nosyntactic embedding. Other contributions in the area consider the composition of themodels expressed in DSLs as a constructive model transformation [1] and examine theeffects of DSL composition at the infrastructure level [9] (e.g., syntax aware editorsetc.). The DSL framework and workbench MontiCore [7,8,10,11] was designed andrealized particularly with respect to compositionality at various dimensions [6,12].Compositionality is of special interest if models of different modeling paradigms- and hence expressed in different languages - need to be combined while at the sametime retaining their speciﬁc semantics. Whenever the different modeling paradigms areintegrated, it can be observed that each paradigm is equipped with its own modelinglanguageandthatthereforesuchaparadigmintegrationisalwaysalsoamodellanguagecomposition. This holds for the composition of structural and behavioral languages aswell as for the composition of languages with synchronous or real-time communicationand event triggered asynchronous models, etc. In the following the dimensions of suchcompositions are discussed in more detail.
['Andreas Horst', 'Bernhard Rumpe']
Towards Compositional Domain Specific Languages