Internal Versus External DSLs for Trace Analysis Extended Abstract

This paper explores the design and implementation issues arising in the development of domain-specific languages for trace analysis. It introduces the audience to the general concepts underlying such special-purpose languages building upon the authors' own experiences in developing both external domain-specific languages and systems, such as EAGLE, HAWK, RULER and LOGSCOPE, and the more recent internal domain-specific language and system TRACECONTRACT within the SCALA language. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are simply special-purpose programming languages and, as such, are far from being a new concept; for example in the field of text processing one can find COMIT in the 1950s, which led to SNOBOL in the 1960s, then on to the likes of AWK, Perl, etc.