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

Annotating syntax trees with labels for control flow

The code for some tree nodes will be sources or targets of control flow. To generate code, we need a way to generate the labels at the targets and propagate that information to the instructions that will go to those targets. It makes sense to start with the attribute named first. The first attribute holds a label to which branch instructions can jump to execute a given statement or expression. It can be synthesized by brute force if need be; if you had to, you could just allocate a unique label to each tree node. The result would be replete with redundant and unused labels, but it would work. For most nodes, the first label can be synthesized from one of their children, instead of allocating a new one.

Consider the additive expression e1 + e2, which builds a non-terminal named AddExpr. If there was any code in e1, it would have a first field, and that would be the label to use for the first field of the entire AddExpr. If e1...