DSL Dialects

time to read 1 min | 168 words

Let us take this fancy DSL:

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And let us say that we want to give the user some sort of UI that shows how this DSL works. The implementation of this DSL isn't really friendly for the UI. It was built for execution, not for display.

So how are we going to solve the problem?  There are a couple of ways of doing that, but the easiest solution that I know of consists of creating a new language implementation that is focused on providing an easy to build UI. A dialect can be either a different language (or version of the language) that maps to the same backend engine, or it can be a different engine that is mapped to the same language.

This is part of the reason that it is so important to create strict separation between the two.