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 about the crucial technical skills and tools used to build symbol tables that track all the variables in all the scopes in the input program. You create a symbol table for every scope in the program and insert entries into the correct symbol table for each variable. All of this is accomplished via traversals of the syntax tree.

You learned how to write tree traversals that create symbol tables for each scope, as well as how to create an inherited attribute for the symbol table associated with the current scope for each node in your syntax tree. You then learned how to insert symbol information into the symbol tables associated with your syntax tree and detect when the same symbol is redeclared illegally. You learned how to write tree traversals that look up information in symbol tables and identify any undeclared variable errors. These skills enabled you to take your first steps in enforcing the semantic rules associated with your programming...