Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition

By : Clinton L. Jeffery
Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition

By: Clinton L. Jeffery

Overview of this book

There are many reasons to build a programming language: out of necessity, as a learning exercise, or just for fun. Whatever your reasons, this book gives you the tools to succeed. You’ll build the frontend of a compiler for your language and generate a lexical analyzer and parser using Lex and YACC tools. Then you’ll explore a series of syntax tree traversals before looking at code generation for a bytecode virtual machine or native code. In this edition, a new chapter has been added to assist you in comprehending the nuances and distinctions between preprocessors and transpilers. Code examples have been modernized, expanded, and rigorously tested, and all content has undergone thorough refreshing. You’ll learn to implement code generation techniques using practical examples, including the Unicon Preprocessor and transpiling Jzero code to Unicon. You'll move to domain-specific language features and learn to create them as built-in operators and functions. You’ll also cover garbage collection. Dr. Jeffery’s experiences building the Unicon language are used to add context to the concepts, and relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow along in your language of choice. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific language.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section I: Programming Language Frontends
7
Section II: Syntax Tree Traversals
13
Section III: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
22
Section IV: Appendix
23
Answers
24
Other Books You May Enjoy
25
Index

Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses

This is the second of two chapters regarding type checking. The previous chapter introduced type checking for built-in atomic types. In comparison, this chapter will cover more complex type-checking operations.

This chapter will show you how to perform type checks for the arrays, parameters, and return types of method calls in the Jzero subset of Java. Additionally, it covers the type checking of structured types such as classes.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • Type-checking arrays
  • Checking method calls
  • Checking structured type accesses

By the end of the chapter, you will be able to write more sophisticated tree traversals to check types that themselves contain one or more other types. Being able to support such composite types in your programming language is necessary for you to go beyond toy programming languages and into the realm of languages that are...