A Pattern Language for Language Implementation

http://press.samedi-studios.com/publications/2004/jones2004pl4li.plopD5/jones2004pl4li.pdf

This is a paper from a while back that we workshoped at PLoP 2004. We are still shopping about for a place to publish it, but it hase some valuable things to say about language implementation.

Abstract. Programming languages are typically considered to be difficult to implement. However, a programming language tailored to an application domain can be an extremely powerful productivity enhancer. We present a pattern language for implementing languages that gathers together many ideas that are known in the language implementation community that should be more widely known. By applying this pattern language, productivity can be increased by the blossoming of more programming languages tailored to a specific purpose. We begin by discussing some of the dichotomies that shape the language design process. The pattern language itself consists of patterns describing various language flavors, and patterns for doing syntactic recognition, evaluation, and source production.