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Referencing paper "Domain-specific languages: a systematic mapping study", a fundamental question that's bugging me, and a simple Google search seems to be of little help, I want to figure out what's the difference between Domain Specific Languages(DSLs)and Domain Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs).

Looks like the boundary is a bit too vague, but as the referenced paper further mentions, modelling community is also careful while using these terms.

Can someone shed some light on this with example, and point to a paper/s that makes it clear?

Thinker
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  • Domain specific modeling abstracts the modeling, not necessarily the language that uses it. Think of UML: it's general-purpose. A DSML would be tailored to the domain instead of being general-purpose. The line will always be blurry, IMO. – Dave Newton Jul 29 '18 at 13:01
  • Sorry, did not understand why is it a fundamental question ;-? – Romain Bernard Jul 30 '18 at 09:40
  • @RomainBernard Fundamental in the sense, if you consider they are actually different then you look at them differently, at their characteristics, their properties and their actual purpose – Thinker Jul 31 '18 at 09:27

2 Answers2

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DSL englobes all kinds of domain-specific languages (including DSML ones) but typically, I stick to the term DSL when talking about domain-specific "programming" languages.

And I agree that there is no clearcut distinction between two but that's just because we don't have a clearcut distinction between programming and modeling either.

Jordi Cabot
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One origin for DSLs comes from the little languages and UNIX philosophy: see http://wiki.c2.com/?LittleLanguage. These tend to be textual languages and targeting programmers as Jordi mentioned.

Domain-Specific Modeling aims to raise the level of abstraction beyond programming closer to the problem domain, see http://www.dsmforum.org/. Describing solutions in problem domains then call for all kinds of representations such as diagrams, matrixes, tables, maps etc. and text too.

Juha-Pekka
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