Now that you've written the front end for your DSEL compiler, and you've learned a bit about the intermediate form it produces, it's time to think about what to do with the intermediate form. This is where you put your domain-specific algorithms and optimizations. Proto gives you two ways to evaluate and manipulate expression templates: contexts and transforms.

Two ways to evaluate expressions! How to choose? Since contexts are largely procedural, they are a bit simpler to understand and debug so they are a good place to start. But although transforms are more advanced, they are also more powerful; since they are associated with rules in your grammar, you can select the proper transform based on the entire structure of a sub-expression rather than simply on the type of its top-most node.

Also, transforms have a concise and declarative syntax that can be confusing at first, but highly expressive and fungible once you become accustomed to it. And -- this is admittedly very subjective -- the author finds programming with Proto transforms to be an inordinate amount of fun! Your mileage may vary.