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

Integrating built-ins with control structures

Control structures are usually bigger things than expressions, such as loops. They are often associated with novel programming language semantics or new scopes that specialized computations can occur in. Control structures provide a context that a statement (often, this is a compound statement consisting of a whole block of code) is executed in. This can be whether (or how many times) it is executed, what associated data the code is to be applied to, or even what semantics the operators should be interpreted with. Sometimes, these control structures are explicitly and solely used for your new operators or built-in functions, but often, the interactions are implicit byproducts of the problem solving that your language enables.

Whether a given block of code is executed, selecting which of several to execute or executing code repeatedly are the most traditional control structures, such as if statements and loops. The most likely opportunities...