[antlr-interest] Language Design

[Andreas Stefik]

Hi Dave,

Are you looking for information on how to make language's usable to
humans, or more technical content? If the former, I could point you to
some very recent academic literature on the topic, including some of
my own. If the latter, sources like the Dragon book are invaluable, as
you already know, although it's more algorithmic than design related.
If the former, it turns out to be the case that word and syntax choice
can make a truly huge differences to novices trying to get "out of the
gate" with your language. Here's one of my recent papers on that:
http://www.cs.siue.edu/~astefik/papers/StefikPlateau2011.pdf

Similarly, there are a number of papers out by the CMU group on
natural programming: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/ That work isn't
all about programming languages, really, but there is a few papers in
there on API design that might be relevant for you (many by Jeff
Stylos). Also, when it comes to usability of type systems, or whether
not you should include aspect-oriented features, Stefan Hanenberg's
work is highly relevant.

Anyway, I don't know if that helps, as it's more on the language
usability side (if that is a consideration for you), but there are
some thoughts,

Stefik



On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 3:49 PM, Ron Burk <ronburk at gmail.com> wrote:
> "And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost."
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