Oliveira, NunoPereira, Maria JoãoHenriques, Pedro RangelCruz, Daniela2009-10-012009-10-012009Oliveira, Nuno; Pereira, Maria João; Henriques, Pedro; Cruz, Daniela (2009). Domain specific languages: a theoretical survey. In INFORUM'09 Simpósio de Informática. Lisboa.http://hdl.handle.net/10198/1192Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs ) are characterized by a set of attributes that make them different and easy to use when compared to General purpose Programming Languages (GPLs ). The fact of being tailored for a specific domain rises many advantages on their usage, however special care must be put in their conception and implementation. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey on DSLs , enhancing their characteristics that make clear the advantages and disadvantages of their usage and make challenging their implementation. We also focus on the development methodologies that have been used to create the thousands of DSLs that exist today, which are a powerful alternative to GPLs .engDomain specific languagesLanguage developmentconference paper