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

Chapter 14: Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions

New programming languages are invented because occasionally, new ideas and new computational capabilities are needed to solve problems in new application domains. Libraries of functions or classes are the basic means of extending mainstream languages with additional computational capabilities, but if adding a library was always sufficient, you wouldn't need to build your own language, would you?

This chapter and the next discuss language extensions that go beyond libraries. This chapter will describe how to support very high-level and domain-specific language features by adding operators and functions that are built into the language. The following chapter will discuss adding control structures.

Adding operators and built-in functions may shorten and reduce what programmers must write to solve certain problems in your language, improve its performance, or enable language semantics that would otherwise be difficult...