MDA Distilled: Principles of Model-Driven Architecture

Building Languages

In the normal course of development, people build languages on a regular basis. For instance, when they use a subset of the UML for analysis and a larger subset for design, and when they specify what the elements of these subsets actually mean, they've defined two new languages, each with a different purpose.

There are two major reasons to seek relatively formal definitions of new languages in the context of MDA. The first is communication among team members. There needs to be agreement on whether to include things like persistence, and many other issues like it, in a certain model, and on how to represent those things. The second is communication with machines. Defining languages formally allows for mappings between models ...