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

An intermediate code instruction set

Intermediate code is like machine-independent assembler code for an abstract CPU. The instruction set defines a set of opcodes. Each opcode specifies its semantics, including how many operands it uses and what state changes occur from executing it. Because this is intermediate code, we do not have to worry about registers or addressing modes – we can just define state changes in terms of what modifications must occur in the main memory. The intermediate code instruction set includes both regular instructions and pseudo instructions, as is the case for other assembler languages. Let’s look at a set of opcodes for the Jzero language. There are two categories of opcodes: instructions and declarations.

Instructions

Except for immediate mode, the operands of instructions are addresses. Based on their operand position, most instructions implicitly dereference (read) and assign (write) values in memory located at those addresses...