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

Selected keywords

Unicon has about 75 keywords. Keywords are global names beginning with an ampersand with a predefined meaning. Many keywords are constant values that are built into the language, while others are associated with built-in domain-specific language facilities such as string scanning or graphics. This section lists the most essential keywords, many of which appear in the examples in this book:

  • &clock : str

    The &clock read-only keyword produces the current time of day.

  • &cset : cset

    The &cset constant keyword denotes the cset containing everything.

  • &date : str

    The &date read-only keyword produces the current date.

  • &digits : cset

    The &digits constant keyword denotes the cset containing 0 through 9.

  • &errout : file

    The &errout constant keyword denotes the standard location for error output.

  • &fail :

    The &fail keyword is an expression that fails to produce a result.

  • &features : str*

    The &features...