[rules-dev] removing DSLs

[Mark Proctor]

One of the reasons this came up was due to round tripping from the guided editor to drl text format. This is so the guided editor does not use it's own proprietary xml format, but instead uses the .drl directly.

Round tripping DRL is not so hard. Round tripping DSLs is much harder, and I suspect will be hard to get fool proof regex. Also we would at a minimum require an escape in the DRL to delimit a DSL sentence.

If you think DSLs are useful, I think we can leave them in, with the caveat of the escape. Sound ok?

Mark
On 29 Jan 2013, at 05:30, Wolfgang Laun <wolfgang.laun at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mark,
> 
> in my talk at RulesFest 2011 I've demonstrated that DSLs in their
> current form are
> indeed useful, perhaps not quite as easy to use as marketing hype
> promises.  The current DSL process exploits regular expressions in a
> clever way, but this has limits. (Programming in something close to
> natural language has been an ongoing
> dream since Rear Admiral G. Hopper's fine achievement, but no
> remarkable progress has been made in half a century.)
> 
> I have presented DSL rules more than once to an audience, and it seems
> that getting non-geeks to appreciate rules is made easier this way.
> 
> There is nothing in the current DSL that depends on DRL except the
> undisputed keywords delimiting a rule. I can see no reason why DSL
> shouldn't just stay the way it is: the documentation is fairly complete (much
> more than for some other Expert features) and it hasn't needed many
> bugfixes I'm aware of.
> 
> Cheers
> Wolfgang
> 
> On 29/01/2013, Mark Proctor <mproctor at codehaus.org> wrote:
>> How would people feel if we removed DSLs from 6.0? There is no decision
>> either way, but I wanted to see if people liked or disliked the idea.
>> 
>> My reason for this is I don't believe DSLs in their current form, beyond
>> demo ware, are useful. They need a lot more work to turn them into guided
>> structured documents, we don't have the people to focus on that right now,
>> and no one from the community has taken this on.
>> 
>> I'd rather see them removed, until they can be done properly.
>> 
>> Mark
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