[antlr-interest] what's in a name?

David-Sarah Hopwood david-sarah at jacaranda.org
Sat Aug 29 14:16:54 PDT 2009


Terence Parr wrote:
> Hi, so we're going back and forth on titles/subtitles for the new book  
> on implementing DSLs and other languages.  Now, we're "Language Design  
> Patterns", where Design is an adjective of Patterns; Language is not  
> an adj of Design.  it's ambiguous though. Using Lang Impl Design  
> Patterns was too long and unwieldy.  So, we added a subtitle about  
> "Techniques for implementing DSLs".  Our marketing has been all about  
> impl DSLs but the book became much more general.
> 
> The confusion is that the current title can be seen as about lang  
> design.  We could do Lang Impl Patterns, but Kent Beck has a Impl  
> Patterns book now that is totally different concept.
> 
> Publisher wants DSL in there somewhere.  Any ideas about title/subtitle?

To be honest I can't see why the "DSL" is in there, since there's no
dependency in any of the patterns on the language being domain-specific.
It would be unfortunate if people didn't buy the book because they
think it's not applicable to implementing a general-purpose language
rather than a DSL.

How about "Language Engineering Patterns: Building Processors for
Domain-Specific and General-Purpose Languages"?

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood  ⚥  http://davidsarah.livejournal.com



More information about the antlr-interest mailing list