Generating fluent embedded domain-specific languages with subchaining

This paper presents Silverchain, a tool that generates a fluent embedded domain-specific language (EDSL) from a BNF-style grammar. A fluent EDSL is a class library that allows its users to embed domain-specific sentences into a program written in a general-purpose language by method chaining. A generated EDSL is designed so that its users can find syntactic errors from type errors and make effective use of method chaining in various situations. The first feature is realized by setting the return type of each method based on which methods may be invoked next, and the second feature is achieved by providing subchaining APIs besides regular chaining APIs. The contribution of this paper is the development of a translation method from a grammar to such an EDSL. Our translation method is modeled as the construction of a set of single-state real-time deterministic pushdown automata (RPAs). A fluent EDSL is obtained by encoding those RPAs into class definitions. In the construction of RPAs, Silverchain does not add or remove any non-terminal from the given grammar. This constraint is required to generate subchaining APIs as specified in the grammar.