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

Summary

This chapter was the second of two chapters covering various aspects of type checking. You learned how to represent compound types. For example, you learned how to build method signatures and use them to check method calls. All of this is accomplished via traversals of the syntax tree, and much of it involves adding minor extensions to the functions presented in the previous chapter.

This chapter also showed you how to recognize array declarations and build the appropriate type representations for them. You learned how to check whether correct types are being used for array creation and access and to build type signatures for method declarations. You also learned how to check that the correct types are being used for method calls and returns.

Congratulations on making it this far! At this point, we have completed our discussion of the front half of a programming language implementation, in which input source code is analyzed. Notations and tools helped greatly with...