Gain an accelerated introduction to domain-specific languages in R, including coverage of regular expressions. This compact, in-depth book shows you how DSLs are programming languages specialized for a particular purpose, as opposed to general purpose programming languages. Along the way, you’ll learn to specify tasks you want to do in a precise way and achieve programming goals within a domain-specific context. Domain-Specific Languages in R includes examples of DSLs including large data sets or matrix multiplication; pattern matching DSLs for application in computer vision; and DSLs for continuous time Markov chains and their applications in data science. After reading and using this book, you’ll understand how to write DSLs in R and have skills you can extrapolate to other programming languages. What You'll Learn Program with domain-specific languages using R Discover the components of DSLs Carry out large matrix expressions and multiplications Implement metaprogramming with DSLs Parse and manipulate expressions Who This Book Is For Those with prior programming experience. R knowledge is helpful but not required.

When carefully selected and used, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) may simplify complex code, promote effective communication with customers, improve productivity, and unclog development bottlenecks. In Domain-Specific Languages, noted software development expert Martin Fowler first provides the information software professionals need to decide if and when to utilize DSLs. Then, where DSLs prove suitable, Fowler presents effective techniques for building them, and guides software engineers in choosing the right approaches for their applications. This book’s techniques may be utilized with most modern object-oriented languages; the author provides numerous examples in Java and C#, as well as selected examples in Ruby. Wherever possible, chapters are organized to be self-standing, and most reference topics are presented in a familiar patterns format. Armed with this wide-ranging book, developers will have the knowledge they need to make important decisions about DSLs—and, where appropriate, gain the significant technical and business benefits they offer. The topics covered include: How DSLs compare to frameworks and libraries, and when those alternatives are sufficient Using parsers and parser generators, and parsing external DSLs Understanding, comparing, and choosing DSL language constructs Determining whether to use code generation, and comparing code generation strategies Previewing new language workbench tools for creating DSLs

An Essential Reference for Intermediate and Advanced R Programmers Advanced R presents useful tools and techniques for attacking many types of R programming problems, helping you avoid mistakes and dead ends. With more than ten years of experience programming in R, the author illustrates the elegance, beauty, and flexibility at the heart of R. The book develops the necessary skills to produce quality code that can be used in a variety of circumstances. You will learn: The fundamentals of R, including standard data types and functions Functional programming as a useful framework for solving wide classes of problems The positives and negatives of metaprogramming How to write fast, memory-efficient code This book not only helps current R users become R programmers but also shows existing programmers what’s special about R. Intermediate R programmers can dive deeper into R and learn new strategies for solving diverse problems while programmers from other languages can learn the details of R and understand why R works the way it does.

Dijkstra once wrote that computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Despite the many incredible advances in c- puter science from times that predate practical mechanical computing, there is still a myriad of fundamental questions in understanding the interface between computers and the rest of the world. Why is it still hard to mechanize many tasks that seem to be fundamentally routine, even as we see ever-increasing - pacity for raw mechanical computing? The disciplined study of domain-speci?c languages (DSLs) is an emerging area in computer science, and is one which has the potential to revolutionize the ?eld, and bring us closer to answering this question. DSLs are formalisms that have four general characteristics. – They relate to a well-de?ned domain of discourse, be it controlling tra?c lights or space ships. – They have well-de?ned notation, such as the ones that exist for prescribing music, dance routines, or strategy in a football game. – The informal or intuitive meaning of the notation is clear. This can easily be overlooked, especially since intuitive meaning can be expressed by many di?erent notations that may be received very di?erently by users. – The formal meaning is clear and mechanizable, as is, hopefully, the case for the instructions we give to our bank or to a merchant online.

This textbook describes the theory and the pragmatics of using and engineering high-level software languages – also known as modeling or domain-specific languages (DSLs) – for creating quality software. This includes methods, design patterns, guidelines, and testing practices for defining the syntax and the semantics of languages. While remaining close to technology, the book covers multiple paradigms and solutions, avoiding a particular technological silo. It unifies the modeling, the object-oriented, and the functional-programming perspectives on DSLs. The book has 13 chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce and motivate DSLs. Chapter 3 kicks off the DSL engineering lifecycle, describing how to systematically develop abstract syntax by analyzing a domain. Chapter 4 addresses the concrete syntax, including the systematic engineering of context-free grammars. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the static semantics – with basic constraints as a starting point and type systems for advanced DSLs. Chapters 7 (Transformation), 8 (Interpretation), and 9 (Generation) describe different paradigms for designing and implementing the dynamic semantics, while covering testing and other kinds of quality assurance. Chapter 10 is devoted to internal DSLs. Chapters 11 to 13 show the application of DSLs and engage with simpler alternatives to DSLs in a highly distinguished domain: software variability. These chapters introduce the underlying notions of software product lines and feature modeling. The book has been developed based on courses on model-driven software engineering (MDSE) and DSLs held by the authors. It aims at senior undergraduate and junior graduate students in computer science or software engineering. Since it includes examples and lessons from industrial and open-source projects, as well as from industrial research, practitioners will also find it a useful reference. The numerous examples include code in Scala 3, ATL, Alloy, C#, F#, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, OCL, Python, QVT, Ruby, and Xtend. The book contains as many as 277 exercises. The associated code repository facilitates learning and using the examples in a course.

"This book presents current research on all aspects of domain-specific language for scholars and practitioners in the software engineering fields, providing new results and answers to open problems in DSL research"--

Your success—and sanity—are closer at hand when you work at a higher level of abstraction, allowing your attention to be on the business problem rather than the details of the programming platform. Domain Specific Languages—"little languages" implemented on top of conventional programming languages—give you a way to do this because they model the domain of your business problem. DSLs in Action introduces the concepts and definitions a developer needs to build high-quality domain specific languages. It provides a solid foundation to the usage as well as implementation aspects of a DSL, focusing on the necessity of applications speaking the language of the domain. After reading this book, a programmer will be able to design APIs that make better domain models. For experienced developers, the book addresses the intricacies of domain language design without the pain of writing parsers by hand. The book discusses DSL usage and implementations in the real world based on a suite of JVM languages like Java, Ruby, Scala, and Groovy. It contains code snippets that implement real world DSL designs and discusses the pros and cons of each implementation. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. What's Inside Tested, real-world examples How to find the right level of abstraction Using language features to build internal DSLs Designing parser/combinator-based little languages