The following paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Conference on Domain-Specific Languages Santa Barbara, California, October 1997 A Special-Purpose Language for Picture-Drawing Samuel N. Kamin and David Hyatt University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign For more information about USENIX Association contact: 1. Phone: 510 528-8649 2. FAX: 510 548-5738 3. Email:
[email protected] 4. WWW URL:http://www.usenix.org A Sp ecial-Purp ose Language for Picture-Drawing y Samuel N. Kamin David Hyatt Computer Science Department University of Il linois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Il linois 61801 fs-kamin,
[email protected] Abstract supp orted in programming languages. This supp ort means allowing the creation of \ rst-class" values of eachtyp e, that is, values not sub ject to arbitrary Special purpose languages are typical ly characterized restrictions based on the typ e. It also means pro- by a type of primitive data and domain-speci c oper- viding op erations appropriate to those typ es in a ations on this data. One approach to special purpose concise, non-bureaucratic form. language design is to embed the data and operations In our view, this approach to language design is p er- of the language within an existing functional lan- guage. The data can be de ned using the typecon- fectly suited to the design of sp ecial-purp ose lan- structions provided by the functional language, and guages. These languages are usually characterized the special purpose language then inherits al l of the byatyp e of primitive data sp eci c to a problem domain, and op erations on those data.