Peculiarities of language engineering in multi-level environments or: Design by elimination: a contribution to the further development of multi-level modeling methods

Abstract

Multi-level modeling (MLM) facilitates the design of modeling languages because foundational language concepts (defined with "linguistic" metamodels) can be reused on any classification level and consequently frees the developer from the burden of re-specifying these concepts each time a new language is designed. This strength of MLM can be used profitably in teaching since it enables students to specify languages with relatively little effort with associated tool support. However, MLM introduces new features that require existing methods to be extended with user support and which introduce verification challenges. This paper describes these challenges with respect to teaching modeling languages and outlines approaches to address them.