Applications of Grammatical Inference in Software Engineering: Domain Specific Language Development

In this chapter, application of grammatical inference to facilitate development of domain-specific languages (DSLs) is presented. Grammatical inference techniques have been applied to infer DSL grammar from DSL programs. Such a scenario would be feasible when domain experts can provide complete DSL programs or excerpts of such programs. The results of grammatical inference, namely the inferred grammar, can be directly used to generate the DSL parser or be further examined by a software language engineer with the aim to further enhance the design of the language. To achieve this goal we developed a memetic algorithm which enables incremental grammar inference. It is a population based evolutionary algorithm enhanced with local search and a generalization phase. Some examples of DSLs from which grammars have been successfully inferred from positive samples are presented.