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

Scanning strings in Icon and Unicon

Unicon inherits this domain control structure from its immediate predecessor, Icon. String scanning is invoked by the s ? expr syntax. Within expr, s is the scanning subject and referenced by a global keyword called &subject. Within the subject string, a current analysis position, which is stored in the &pos keyword, denotes the index location in the subject string where it is being examined. The position starts at the beginning of the string and can be moved back and forth, typically working its way toward the end of the string. For example, in the following program, s contains "For example, suppose string s contains":

procedure main()
   s := "For example, suppose string s contains"
   s ? {
      tab(find("suppose"))
      write("after tab()")
   }
end

Now, let's say we were to add...