Re: Lua as a "domain specific language"?

[mfmorss@...]

Leave off with such terms as "hillbilly cousin," all right?

Mark F. Morss
Principal Analyst, Market Risk
American Electric Power


                                                                           
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                                       Lua as a "domain specific           
             03/09/2006 01:20          language"?                          
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Hello,

The preface to "Programming in Lua" states that "many people regard Lua
not as a language, but as a kit for building domain-specific
languages". Fair enough, but what does that mean in practice? What
usage of Lua qualifies as "domain specific language"? Does anyone have
a concrete example of using Lua for such purpose?

Suspending disbelieve for an instant, one could imagine the DSL realm
as something like "data definition language" or perhaps its hillbilly
cousin: object-relational mapping.

Bellow are a couple of syntactical example broadly dealing with the
same issue of "data definition" and/or "mapping":


Oracle's SQL:

create table orders (
   order_id number,
   order_dt date,
   cust_id  references customer
   constraint pk_orders (order_id)
)


Smalltalk's GLORP:

Joinfrom: (myTable fieldNamed: 'ADMIN_ID') to: (userTable fieldNamed:
'ID'))


Lisp's CLSQL:

(manager :accessor employee-manager :db-kind :join :db-info
(:join-class employee :home-key managerid :foreign-key emplid :set
nil))


Perl's Class::DBI:

Music::CD->has_a(artist => 'Music::Artist');


Python's SQLObject 2:

class Foo(SQLObject):
     other = Reference('Other', 'other_id')


Ruby's RoR:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
     belongs_to              :portfolio
     has_one                 :project_manager
     has_many                :milestones
     has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
end


Is any of the above an illustration of "domain specific language"?

What would be a "domain specific language" way to convey such
information in Lua?

Does this qualify as "data manipulation language"?

local aStatement = function()
         Select()
         From( Employee )
         Where( Eq( name, "Vladimir" ), Eq( city, "Moskva" ) )
         Order( By( name ) )
end

Could this be a "data definition language"?

local aModel = function()
     Is( Employee, hr.v_employee )
     Has( name, string )
     HasOne( manager, Manager )
     HasMany( colleagues, Employee )
end

Confused :/

Cheers

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/