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 structured type accesses

In this book, the phrase structured type will denote composite objects that can hold a mixture of types whose elements are accessed by name. This contrasts with arrays, whose elements are accessed by their position and whose elements are of the same type.

In some languages, there are struct or record types for this kind of data. In Jzero and most object-oriented languages, classes are used as the principal structured type.

This section discusses aspects of how to check the types for operations on classes and, more specifically, class instances. This organization mirrors the presentation of array types at the beginning of this chapter, starting with what is needed to process declarations of class variables.

The original intent of Jzero was to support a tiny Java subset that was somewhat comparable to Wirth’s PL/0 language. Such a language does not require class instances or object orientation, and space limitations prevent us from...