Sure. I would describe that as a domain-specific language (DSL), although not all domain-specific languages look like that. DSLs that don't encode any computati

Sure. I would describe that as a domain-specific language (DSL), although not all domain-specific languages look like that. DSLs that don't encode any computation are sometimes described as "configuration" languages, but I'm not sure that term is particularly well-defined. Domain-specific languages are one of the most powerful yet underused techniques in programming—especially if the language can be embedded inside a rich, general-purpose language. We get to bear all the abstractive capability of language at our domain while also having general programming language techniques at our disposal (static analysis, optimization, type checking... etc). If we're really doing a good job we can even make sure our DSL is easy to reason about and has good semantics, using the theoretical tools developed to analyze general-purpose programs. One neat trick is that a lot of tools that are difficult to use on general-purpose languages like automatic verification or program synthesis can become far easier to apply and more practical when working with a small DSL. A lot of tools in this vein would be a multi-year research project to implement for a language like C but only a multi-week project for sufficiently constrained, well-behaved DSLs. And if you're designing your DSL, you can design it in tandem with this tooling, making the problem even more tractable.