Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language

By : Clinton L. Jeffery
Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language

By: Clinton L. Jeffery

Overview of this book

The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software. In this book, you’ll start with implementing the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how domain-specific language features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. We’ll conclude with how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts where relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow the code of your choice of either a very high-level language with advanced features, or a mainstream language. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming Language Frontends
7
Section 2: Syntax Tree Traversals
13
Section 3: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
21
Section 4: Appendix

Summary

This chapter was the second of two chapters covering various aspects of type checking. You learned how to represent compound types. For example, you learned how to build method signatures and use them to check method calls. All of this is accomplished via traversals of the syntax tree, and much of it involves adding minor extensions to the functions presented in the previous chapter.

This chapter also showed you how to recognize array declarations and build the appropriate type representations for them. You learned how to check whether correct types are being used for array creation and access and to build type signatures for method declarations. You also learned how to check that correct types are being used for method calls and returns.

While writing fancier tree traversal functions is a valuable skill in its own right, representing type information and propagating it around the syntax tree to where it is needed also makes an excellent practice of the skills you will...