Supporting Variability with Late Semantic Adaptations of Domain-Specific Modeling Languages

Meta-object protocols are used to open up the implementations of object-oriented general-purpose languages to support semantic variability. They enable performing application-level semantic adaptations to the language even at runtime. However, such meta-object protocols are not available for domain specific-modeling languages. Also, existing approaches to implementing domain-specific modeling languages do not support semantic adaptations, where the application basically redefines specific parts of the language semantics. We propose a new approach for the implementation of domain-specific modeling languages that uses metaobjects and meta-object protocols to open up the implementation of domain-specific abstractions. This approach enables runtime semantic variability of the form of applicationspecific late semantic adaptations of domain-specific modeling languages that depend on the runtime application context.