Professor Fish

Bran Selic, during his #models13 tutorial on modeling language design, mentioned the notion of "syntactic sugar" in passing, and he sort of stated, as far as I understood, that he isn't too happy with the term, as it seems to belittle those constructs; they are certainly important presumably for those who want to benefit from these constructs, for as long as we assume that the constructs do indeed capture valuable domain concepts. (Sorry if I am getting him wrong.) This got me thinking in that I wanted to hypothesize profoundly why this stuff is called "syntactic sugar". I was always assuming (and I think this is not controversial) that it simply classifies a language construct such that it can be eliminated from the language syntax by "desugaring", i.e., by a syntactic translation to core constructs. Of course, people use the term syntactic sugar in a somewhat more flexible manner. That is, they may also use it for constructs that do require a bit...

I am very happy to provide the keynote of OOPSLE  2013 at WCRE (The first workshop on Open and Original Problems in Software Language Engineering). Here is the title, abstract, etc. Looking forward the meeting in October in Koblenz. Greetings from Neustadt a. d. Weinstrasse. Speaker Ralf Lämmel, University of Koblenz-Landau Title An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography on Software Language Engineering Abstract Given that OOPSLE is about open (and) original problems on software language engineering (SLE), it does make a lot of sense to look back at somewhat closed (and back then) original problems on SLE. Such look into the (rather recent) past will be provided by this talk in the form of an annotated and illustrated bibliography. Annotations take the usual form of a bit of text that is summarizing the work. Illustrations take the form of capturing terms and principle examples in a declarative language such as Prolog or Haskell. The speaker is working on such a bi...