The word "domain" appears in this sense on the first page of Aho and
Ullman and ANTLR (which I know you've used) describes itself as a tool
for building domain-specific languages. Both pre-date Ruby I'm fairly sure.
James Lu, quoting Jonathan Fine, used the term "internal DSL" and
although that's new to me, people seem to be interpreting it in the
sense that Gradle is a Groovy DSL (note caps), a build tool a lot of
software developers will be familiar with. In that case, what you write
really is Groovy, but the execution environment has been pre-conditioned
with objects and libraries that (almost) make a new language. When you
understand what's going on (not sure I always do), it becomes possible
to mix Gradle statements and Groovy freely. The most immediate benefit
is that all the apparatus of expressions and types/methods is already
present. So "internal" is the key word.
The point about punctuation is spot-on, I think: Groovy is relatively
free of (makes optional) some punctuation, including the parentheses
that make calls easily identifiable in Python. So quite possibly
starting from Python is limiting if what you want is an*internal* DSL
with a grammar you choose: the object system is fantastic-plastic, but
the grammar is not. DSLs embedded in Python are common, of course
(f-strings, regexes, SQL), and DSLs can generate Python from fragments
with almost no constraints on their own grammar. iPython strikes me as
possibly a Python internal DSL, or Django, but what they've done does
not take us far from pure Python.
Jeff Allen
On 31/08/2018 05:07, Guido van Rossum wrote:
<snip>
Hm. YAML is indeed a great, readable alternative to JSON or XML. But
the term DSL implies (to me) more than just nested key-value pairs.
(Though who knows maybe that's all Keras needs, and then it's a poor
argument for having a DSL.)
Then again maybe I'm confusing DSL (which appears to be a Rubyism)
with "little language": http://wiki.c2.com/?LittleLanguage
--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido <http://python.org/%7Eguido>)
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