A first taste of Vanilla
Simon Dobson · Arrow@dit (Dublin Institute of Technology) · 1998
We present an overview of Vanilla, a system for building interpreters from components implementing language fragments. We describe Vanilla's architecture and capabilities, and illustrate its use by defining a simple language feature. 1. Introduction Current trends in software engineering are leading to a methodology in which applications are constructed by combining components distributed across the Internet. This brings new challenges for the programming language community: to provide language structures and infrastructure to fully leverage the capabilities implicit in distributed components, without compromising the efficiency, correctness or integrity of the resulting software systems. It is becoming clear that current programming languages are incomplete with respect to their handling of composition and distribution, and especially in capturing the highlevel constraints which will control market acceptance of component-based systems. There is therefore a substantial need for expe...