Domain Specific Languages for ad hoc Distributed Applications

The Internet provides a medium to combine human and computational entities together for ad hoc cooperative transactions. To make this possible, there must be a framework allowing all parties (human or other) to communicate with each other. The current framework makes a fundamental distinction between human agents (who use HTML) and computational agents, which use CORBA or COM. We propose DSLs as a means to allow all kinds of agents to \speak the same language." In particular we adopt some ideas (and syntax) from SGML/XML, especially the strict separation of syntax and semantics, so each agent in a collaboration is capable of applying a behavioral semantics appropriate to its role (buyer, seller, editor). We develop the example of a card game, where the syntax of the language itself implies some of the semantics of the game.