1.6 Summary
More and more languages are used for building software. Almost always, multiple languages are needed to create one single application. I use the name software language to indicate any of them: a modeling language, a query language, a programming language, or any other kind of language.
The nature of software languages has changed over the years. The most important software languages used to be textual, but currently many software languages have a graphical syntax. Furthermore, many languages today have two or more syntaxes: for instance, both a textual and a graphical, or a normal and an interchange syntax.
Because the applications that we create are becoming more and more complex, the languages that we use must reside at a higher level of abstraction. Otherwise, we will never be able to meet the ever-rising demands and expectations of our customers.
All software languages must be artificially created. Therefore, language specification—both the act and the result of the act—becomes very important. Luckily, this is not a completely new field. We can draw on the knowledge gained in natural-language research, compiler technology, graph theory, and visual languages.