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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

You're reading from  Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

Product type Book
Published in Aug 2013
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781782160304
Pages 342 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Lorenzo Bettini Lorenzo Bettini
Profile icon Lorenzo Bettini

Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
1. Implementing a DSL 2. Creating Your First Xtext Language 3. The Xtend Programming Language 4. Validation 5. Code Generation 6. Customizations 7. Testing 8. An Expression Language 9. Type Checking 10. Scoping 11. Building and Releasing 12. Xbase 13. Bibliography
Index

Improvements to the DSL


Now that we have a working DSL, we can do some improvements and modifications to the grammar.

After every modification to the grammar, as we said in the section The Xtext generator, we must run the MWE2 workflow so that Xtext will generate the new ANTLR parser and the updated EMF classes.

First of all, while experimenting with the editor, you might have noted that while

MyEntity[] myattribute;

is a valid sentence of our DSL, this one (note the spaces between the square brackets)

MyEntity[  ] myattribute;

produces a syntax error.

This is not good, since spaces should not be relevant in a DSL (although there are languages like Python and Haskell where spaces are indeed relevant).

The problem is due to the fact that in the Attribute rule, we specified [], thus, no space is allowed between the square brackets; we can modify the rule as follows:

Attribute: type=[Entity] (array?='[' ']')? name=ID ';';

Since we split the two square brackets into two separate tokens, spaces between...

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