Reusable Textual Notations for Domain-Specific Languages

Domain-specific languages enable concise and precise formalization of domain concepts and promote direct employment by domain experts. Therefore, syntactic constructs are introduced to empower users to associate concepts and relationships with visual textual symbols. Model-based language engineering facilitates the description of concepts and relationships in an abstract manner. However, concrete representations are commonly attached to abstract do-main representations, such as annotations in metamodels, or directly encoded into language grammar and thus introduce redundancy between metamodel elements and grammar elements. In this work, we propose an approach that enables autonomous development and maintenance of domain concepts and textual language notations in a distinctive and metamodel-agnostic manner by employing style models containing grammar rule templates and injection-based property selection. We provide an implementation and showcase the proposed notation-specification language in a comparison with state of the art practices during the creation of notations for an executable domain-specific modeling language based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework and Xtext.