TXL: a rapid prototyping system for programming language dialects

This paper describes a rapid prototyping system for extensions to an existing programming language. Such extensions might include new language features or might introduce notation specific to a particular problem domain. The system consists of a dialect description language used to specify the syntax and semantics of extensions, and a context sensitive syntactic transducer that automatically implements the extensions by transforming source programs written using them to equivalent programs in the original unextended language. Because the transformer is context sensitive, it is more powerful than traditional context free preprocessors and extensible languages can be used to prototype language extensions involving significantly new programming paradigms such as object oriented programming.