The point of a mini domain-specific lanugage is to make a single task really, really easy. You almost certainly have a host language, but you're choosing not to use that because it doesn't make that single task really, really easy.

Imagine if, every time you wanted to parse text, you had to build your own Finite State Machine, node-by-node. You could hardly get any work done. Fortunately, Perl provides a regular expression domain-specific langauge that builds the FSM for you.

Would replacing regexen with Tcl help? No, not at all. Deal with it :)

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re^2: the disadvantages of mini-languages by hardburn
in thread the disadvantages of mini-languages by metaperl

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