Lambda the Ultimate

Is it semantics of DSLs that differentiates them from GP PLs? Or is it only pragmatics ("you can do the same in any GP but it's easier/faster/cheaper to do in this DSL")?

In other words, can we define as DSLs those PLs whose semantic domains are, uh, domain specific? By a semantic domain here I mean the range (or codomain) of a semantic function, and the domain of this function is a syntactic domain... All these puns are not really intended :-(

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After several unsuccessful attempts to pursue this path, I came to another "definition" - DSLs are the PLs with the pragmatics massively dominating the semantics :-)

PS: I would be very interested in seeing any references to papers on denotational semantics of some DSL.

Chris Coyne's Context Free Design Grammar was just mentioned by Perry Wagle on the #haskell irc channel. It's a beautiful use of simple concepts in a surprising manner. If you haven't seen the examples, you're missing out.

Chris mentions on the download page that's he's gotten a lot of hits because he's linked from SCIgen, the recently slashdotted automatic CS paper generation project at MIT. Even more amazing, One of their randomly generated papers was accepted.