We are pleased to present the proceedings of the third international conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2010). The conference was held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands during October 12–13, 2010. It was co-located with the ninth international conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE) and the workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD). An important goal of SLE is to integrate the different sub-communities of the software-language-engineering community to foster cross-fertilisation and strengthen research overall. The doctoral symposium at SLE 2010 contributed towards this goal by providing a forum for both early and late-stage PhD students, who presented their research and got detailed feedback and advice from other researchers.
The SLE conference series is devoted to a wide range of topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE is an international research forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to expand the frontiers of software language engineering. SLE’s foremost mission is to encourage and organize communication between communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different, more specialized, and yet complementary perspectives. SLE emphasizes the fundamental notion of languages as opposed to any realization in specific technical spaces. In this context, the term ”software language” comprises all sorts of artificial languages used in software development including general-purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages, modeling and meta-modeling languages, data models, and ontologies. Software language engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, use, and maintenance of these languages. The SLE conference is concerned with all phases of the lifecycle of software languages; these include the design, implementation, documentation, testing, deployment, evolution, recovery, and retirement of languages. Of special interest are tools, techniques, methods, and formalisms that support these activities. In particular, tools are often based on, or automatically generated from, a formal description of the language. Hence, the treatment of language descriptions as software artefacts, akin to programs, is of particular interest – while noting the special status of language descriptions, and the tailored engineering principles and methods for modularization, refactoring, refinement, composition, versioning, co-evolution, and analysis that can be applied to them.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software Language Engineering, SLE 2010, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in October 2010. The 24 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The book also contains the abstracts of two invited talks. The papers are grouped in topical sections on grammarware, metamodeling, evolution, programming, and domain-specific languages. The short papers and demos included deal with modeling and transformations and translations.