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

Exploring references for further reading

Here is a detailed bibliography of the works we discussed in the previous section. Within each subsection, the works are listed alphabetically by author.

Studying programming language design

In the area of programming language design, you may find the following items to be of interest:

  • Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second edition, MIT Press, 1996.
  • Rafael Finkel, Advanced Programming Language Design, Pearson 1995.
  • Ralph Griswold, History of the Icon Programming Language, Proceedings of HOPL-II, ACM SIGPLAN Notices 28:3 March 1993, pages 53–68.
  • Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, Byte Magazine August 1981, pages 286–298.
  • John Ousterhout, Scripting: Higher-Level Programming for the 21st Century, IEEE Computer 31:3, March 1998, pages 23–30.
  • John Ousterhout, Why Threads Are a Bad Idea (for most purposes), Invited talk...