Language Towers as Desigh Frameworks Olin Shivers, Panagiotis Manolios (Georgia Tech) 0438871; Matthew Flatt (University of Utah) 0438847
Good notations enable good design: they channel designer effort away from infeasible designs, highlight novel aspects of a specific design, supress inessential detail, and enable both human and automated reasoning about the artifact being described. Unfortunately, a tremendous amount of labor is required at the meta-design level to implement the tool suites supporting design in a new, extended, or domains-specific notation. This labor overhead means it is not practical for most designers and engineers to incorporate notation design, or meta-design, into their design methodology.
This research explores developing the meta-tools to allow the development of specialized notations, allowing designers to better express and reason about their artifacts. The focus of the research is on enabling design-time reasoning---what the programming-language community refers to as "static semantics"---of the designed artifact.
The resulting framework allows the construction of "language towers," that is, notations defined at varying levels of abstraction, linked by procedurally-encoded static semantics (analyses) and dynamic semantics (translations) between the levels of the tower. While the work has its origin in the research underlying the Scheme macro system, it is intended to be applied to language frameworks that have much greater static-semantic content.
