1 Using TAME

TAME is The Adaptive Metalanguage, a programming language and system of tools designed to aid in the development; understanding; and maintenance of systems performing numerous calculations on a complex graph of dependencies; conditions; and a large number of inputs.

This system was developed at Ryan Specialty Group² to handle the complexity of comparative insurance rating systems. It is a domain-specific language (DSL) that itself encourages, through the use of templates, the creation of sub-DSLs. TAME itself is at heart a calculator—processing only numerical input and output—driven by quantifiers as predicates. Calculations and quantifiers are written declaratively without concern for order of execution.

The system has powerful dependency resolution and data flow capabilities.

TAME consists of a macro processor (implementing a metalanguage); numerous compilers for various targets (JavaScript, HTML documentation and debugging environment, LaTeX, and others); linkers; and supporting tools. The input grammar is XML, and the majority of the project (including the macro processor, compilers, and linkers) is written in XSLT.³