What Is ADomain

• Our definition of DomainSpecificLanguages inherits the vagueness of one of its defining terms: problem domain. Rather than attempting to define this volatile notion as well, we list and categorize a number of domains for which DSLs have actually been built.

The DSLAnnotatedBibliography also refers to the "Domain as a set of systems" perspective adopted in the SoftwareReuse and DomainEngineering communities.

GenerativeProgrammingBook, p. 34, is more courageous, and defines a domain as an area of knowledge which:

• is scoped to maximize the satisfaction of the requirements of its stakeholders
• includes a set of concepts and terminology understood by practitioners in that area; and
• includes the knowledge of how to build software systems (or parts of software systems) in that area

SemanticDesigns defines a domain as a formal system of notation having a formal semantics. Their DMSSoftwareReengineeringToolkit supports this notion directly, by enabling a DomainEngineer^? to define notations directly, and to define semantics via various means, including attribute evaluators for analyzers and program transformations as axioms and/or implementation methods. Typically one defines a domain for practical reasons, and so these tend to closely match the GenerativeProgrammingBook definition, above, in intent.

CategoryDSL | ArieVanDeursen - 11 May 2001