Haskell and DSLs

One of the great features of Haskell is the ability to write programs that execute in contexts that are separate from the rest of your program. Monads are one of those kinds of contexts, and a monad allows you to define exactly what happens when you sequence different expressions within a context. Using this, one can write little imperative DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) that execute along side the rest of your Haskell code.

There's DSLs for controlling "robots" in Hudak's Haskell School of Expression book. There's a DSL that is a "vintage basic". There's another one for controlling small realtime systems called Atom.

The possibilities seem endless.

I've been considering making one of these as a replacement for the old Unix program expect, or at least a subset of it that I'm interested in. Haskell's already got very strong regular expression libraries, and some of the best parser writing libraries I've seen. Having something like the expect syntax for interacting with remote services or devices would be excellent in conjunction with those other capabilities.

I found a tutorial online today about DSLs that seems pretty good. We'll see if I ever get to the point of implementing one.