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 operations on array types

An array is a sequence of elements that are all the same type. Up to this point, the Jzero language hasn’t really supported array types, other than to allow enough syntax for main() to declare its array of the String parameter. Now, it is time to add support for the remainder of the Jzero array operations, which are a small subset of what Java arrays can do. Jzero arrays are limited to single-dimension arrays created without initializers. To check array operations properly, we will modify the code from the previous chapters so that we can recognize array variables when they are declared, and then check all uses of these arrays to only allow legal operations. Let’s begin with array variable declarations.

Handling array variable declarations

The idea that a variable will hold a reference to an array is attached to the variable’s type in the recursive grammar rule, in j0gram.y, for the non-terminal VarDeclarator. The rule...