A domain-specific language (DSL) is a language used for a specific application or specific piece of software. A whole program cannot be written using a single DSL, but complete software may have programming in a number of domain-specific languages. The Unix community uses multiple DSLs in their systems and developers make their libraries available online as a free resource.
A domain-specific language is a language with a specific purpose upon which some features of an application or program can be written. DSLs are used widely in the application programming domain. Common examples are HTML for Web pages' specific domains and CSS, which both are used commonly on a large scale. DSLs are in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which can be applied on a number of various domains and does not have specialized features. DSLs can be further divided into the kind of application they can be used on, but are collectively known as domain-specific languages.
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