In my last post I described how to cope with generic types in a meta model regarding the scoping mechanism of XText. This post is about the oddities (not meant in a bad way) of XTexts object creation strategy.
Let us take the entity model example from my last post and refine it a little bit. Since we are creating a textual DSL (domain-specific language) and not a GPL (general-purpose language), we would like to add (further) abstractions to our language. Therefore, we do not use the language itself to describe collection types, but integrate it into the language. In contrast, in Java a List
is an interface with several implementations like LinkedList
and ArrayList
. They are all implemented in Java and not part of the language features itself. Of course, there are some general-purpose languages like Python, which integrate collections directly into the language, or others like Google Dart which semi-integrate them via syntactic sugar, but still have implemented them as normal classes. But this is not the point here: We would like to integrate collections as a concept into our language…