Abstract
Spreadsheets are commonly used by non-programmers to store data in a structured form, this data can in some cases be considered to be a program in a domain-specific language (DSL). Unlike ordinary text-based domain-specific languages, there is however currently no formalism for expressing the syntax of such spreadsheet-based DSLs (SDSLs), and there is no tool support for automatically generating language infrastructure such as parsers and IDE support. In this paper we define a simple notion of two-dimensional grammars for SDSLs, and show how such grammars can be used for automatically generating parsers that extract structured data from a spreadsheet in the form of an AST. We demonstrate automatic generation of parsers for a number of examples, including the questionnaire DSL from LWC2014 and a DSL for writing safety specifications.
- R. Abraham and M. Erwig. Ucheck: A spreadsheet type checker for end users. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 18(1):71 –– 95, 2007. ISSN 1045-926X. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. Adam, M. Larsen, K. Jensen, and U. P. Schultz. Towards rule-based dynamic safety monitoring for mobile robots. In SIMPAR, pages 207– 218. Springer, 2014. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Z. Chen and M. Cafarella. Automatic web spreadsheet data extraction. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Search over the Web, page 1. ACM, 2013. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. Efftinge, M. Eysholdt, J. Köhnlein, S. Zarnekow, R. von Massow, W. Hasselbring, and M. Hanus. Xbase: Implementing domain-specific languages for java. In Proc. of the 11th Int. Conf. on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, GPCE ’12, pages 112– 121. ACM, 2012. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- F. Hermans, M. Pinzger, and A. van Deursen. Automatically extracting class diagrams from spreadsheets. In ECOOP 2010–Object-Oriented Programming, pages 52–75. Springer, 2010. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- V. Hung, B. Benatallah, and R. Saint-Paul. Spreadsheet-based complex data transformation. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, pages 1749–1754. ACM, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Ishida. Q: A scenario description language for interactive agents. Computer, 35(11):42–47, 2002. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- L. C. Kats and E. Visser. The spoofax language workbench: Rules for declarative specification of languages and ides. In Proc. of ACM OOPSLA’10, pages 444–463, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- LWC Program Committee. Call for participation LWC2014, 2014. http://www.languageworkbenches.net/wp-content/ uploads/2013/11/Call-for-Participation1.pdf.Google Scholar
- M. Mernik, J. Heering, and A. M. Sloane. When and how to develop domain-specific languages. ACM computing surveys (CSUR), 37(4): 316–344, 2005. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. J. O’Connor, C. Halaschek-Wiener, and M. A. Musen. M2: A language for mapping spreadsheets to OWL. OWLED, vol. 614, 2010.Google Scholar
- J.-P. Tolvanen and S. Kelly. Metaedit+: defining and using integrated domain-specific modeling languages. In Companion Proc. of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN OOPSLA Conf., pages 819–820. ACM, 2009. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Van Deursen, P. Klint, and J. Visser. Domain-specific languages: An annotated bibliography. Sigplan Notices, 35(6):26–36, 2000. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Völter, J. Siegmund, T. Berger, and B. Kolb. Towards userfriendly projectional editors. In Software Language Engineering - 7th International Conference, SLE, volume 8706, pages 41–61. Springer, 2014.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Towards tool support for spreadsheet-based domain-specific languages
Recommendations
Towards tool support for spreadsheet-based domain-specific languages
GPCE 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and ExperiencesSpreadsheets are commonly used by non-programmers to store data in a structured form, this data can in some cases be considered to be a program in a domain-specific language (DSL). Unlike ordinary text-based domain-specific languages, there is however ...
Declaratively defining domain-specific language debuggers
GCPE '11Tool support is vital to the effectiveness of domain-specific languages. With language workbenches, domain-specific languages and their tool support can be generated from a combined, high-level specification. This paper shows how such a specification ...
Testing domain-specific languages
OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companionThe Spoofax testing language provides a new approach to testing domain-specific languages as they are developed. It allows test cases to be written using fragments of the language under test, providing full IDE support for writing test cases and ...






Comments