Wyvern is a new general-purpose programming language that supports the definition and use of naturally embedded domain-specific languages. As described at Parsing@SLE 2013, Wyvern’s design allows developers to equip a type definition with an associated custom parser. This parser is then invoked to parse literals of that type. This approach, which we call type-specific languages (TSLs), supports natural syntax as well as appropriate static and dynamic semantics for the embedded language, and ensures that separately defined TSLs can be used together without conflict. We will demonstrate this approach through a series of small example TSLs defined in Wyvern.

Jonathan Aldrich is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director of CMU’s Ph.D. and undergraduate minor programs in Software Engineering, and teaches courses in programming languages, software engineering, and program analysis for quality and security. In addition, he serves as a consultant on architecture, design, and legal issues in the software industry. Dr. Aldrich joined the CMU faculty after completing a Ph.D. at the University of Washington and a B.S. at Caltech.

Dr. Aldrich’s research centers on programming languages and type systems that are deeply informed by software engineering considerations. His research contributions include verifying the correct implementation of an architectural design, modular formal reasoning about code, and API protocol specification and verification. For his work on software architecture, Aldrich received a 2006 NSF CAREER award and the 2007 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, given annually for a significant technical contribution to object-oriented programming. Current areas of research focus include extensible programming languages, analysis and type systems for security and productivity, and foundations of object-oriented programming.