Corpus-based analysis of domain-specific languages

As more domain-specific languages (DSLs) are designed and developed, the need to evaluate these languages becomes an essential part of the overall DSL life cycle. Corpus-based analysis can serve as an evaluation mechanism to identify characteristics of the language after it has been deployed by looking at how end-users employ it in practice. This analysis that is based on actual usage of the language brings a new perspective which can be considered by a language engineer when working toward improving the language. In this paper, we describe our utilization of corpus-based analysis techniques and exemplify them on the evaluation of the Puppet and ATL DSLs. We also outline an Eclipse plug-in, which is a generic corpus-based DSL analysis tool that can accommodate the evaluation of different DSLs.

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