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

In this chapter, you learned the difference between inventing a programming language and inventing a library API to support whatever kinds of computing you want to do. Several different forms of programming language implementations were considered. This first chapter allowed you to think about functional and non-functional requirements for your own language. These requirements might be different from the example requirements discussed for the Java subset Jzero and the Unicon programming language, which were both introduced.

Requirements are important because they allow you to set goals and define what success will look like. In the case of a programming language implementation, the requirements include what things will look and feel like to the programmers that use your language, as well as what hardware and software platforms it must run on. The look and feel of a programming language includes answering both external questions regarding how the language implementation and the programs written in the language are invoked, as well as internal issues such as verbosity: how much the programmer must write to accomplish a given compute task.

You may be keen to get straight to the coding part. Although the classic build and fix mentality of novice programmers might work on scripts and short programs, for a piece of software as large as a programming language, we need a bit more planning first. After this chapter's coverage of the requirements, Chapter 2, Programming Language Design, will prepare you to construct a detailed plan for the implementation that will occupy our attention for the remainder of this book!