September 2010
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
15h 57m
English
When people talk about the benefits of using DSLs, you often hear them say that they support a more declarative approach to programming. I confess to having a problem with the word “declarative”; it often seems to be used as a very broad brush. In general, however, declarative means “something other than imperative.”
Mainstream programming languages follow the imperative computational model. The imperative model defines computation through a sequence of steps: do this, do that, if (red) do the other. Conditionals and loops vary the steps, and steps can be grouped together into functions. Object-oriented languages add bundling together of data and process, as well as polymorphism—but are still grounded ...
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