Towards a Spreadsheet-Based Language Workbench

Abstract

Spreadsheets are widely used across industries for various purposes, including for storing and manipulating data in a structured form. Such structured forms—expressed using tabular notation—have found their way in language workbenches, which are tools to define (domain-specific modeling) languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for them. There, a tabular notation is oftentimes used as a secondary way to represent concrete syntax of certain language constructs; however, it is not a primary means for (meta)model definition. We present early results on implementing a language workbench where metamodels, models, and editor services are defined only using a tabular notation. We give an overview of the desired functionality of spreadsheet-based language workbenches.