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

What is intermediate code?

At this point, you may be asking, what is intermediate code, and what will I need to generate it? We previously defined it as a sequence of machine-independent instructions, but what does that mean? A sequence can be represented by either an array or a linked list, or possibly something fancier; in Unicon, it will just be a list, while in Java, it will be an ArrayList. But what are the elements – these machine-independent instructions? Like a machine-dependent instruction, a machine-independent instruction has an opcode and zero or more data values used as operands. The difference is that instructions for a real machine have a very specific and precise binary layout in one or more bytes, using machine-specific registers and memory addressing modes. In contrast, machine-independent instructions refer to data values in a more abstract way, as values to be found at some location in memory.

The act of generating intermediate code produces enough information...