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5 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
Our solutions to the four challenges of template
proposals, formatters, content-assist, and scoping
have been developed and evaluated in the context of
EATXT, but are not only useful there. Instead, we ar-
gue that similar approaches are helpful for any highly
structured abstract syntax for which Xtext is used
to generate editors for a textual concrete syntax. A
specific language will benefit from adaptations, espe-
cially in the area of scoping. As such, our solutions
are not generic enough to contribute to Xtext directly,
but will hopefully serve as a blueprint that is useful to
other engineers with similar challenges.
We view our contributions in the light of a future
language workbench that supports the blended mod-
eling for large DSLs that evolve. As described in our
previous work (Holtmann et al., 2022), EAST-ADL is
such a language and support for its evolution within
Eclipse is a relatively new capability. Our work fur-
ther supports this approach by providing a stream-
lined way to generate the editors whenever the lan-
guage changes. When coupled with the generation
of a graphical editor (see, e.g., (Cooper and Kolovos,
2019)), this brings us closer to the ideal of a blended
modeling language workbench.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Parts of this research were sponsored by Vinnova un-
der grant agreement nr. 2019-02382 as part of the
ITEA4 project BUMBLE.
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