Trade: A language and its tool support for programming in electrical engineering

Domain-specific languages (DSL) are languages tailored to a specific problem domain. There is a common perception to distinguish between horizontal and vertical domains. Horizontal domains covering technical software areas as user interface, data base, and testing are elaborated resulting in different DSLs available today. On contrary, vertical domains such as insurance, telephony, or electrical engineering are much less elaborated with sporadic DSLs available and, as result, low experience about design and implementation of vertical DSLs. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a domainspecific language in the domain of electrical engineering. Furthermore we present tool support for this language that enables domain experts (e.g. electrical engineers) to develop and maintain programs in their domain and to automatically generate corresponding C# programs for the .NET platform. The tool support was integrated with the Visual Studio development environment. The approach and solution presented in this paper enriches the set of successful applications and experiences in the field of domain-specific languages for vertical domains.