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

Generating code for expressions

The easiest code to generate is straight-line code consisting of statements and expressions that execute in sequence with no control flow. As described earlier in this chapter, there are two attributes to compute for each node: the attribute for where to find an expression’s value is called addr, while the intermediate code necessary to compute its value is called icode.

The values to be computed for these attributes for a subset of the Jzero expression grammar are shown in the following table. The ||| operator refers to list concatenation:

Figure 9.4: Semantic rules for expressions

The main intermediate code generation algorithm is a post-order traversal of the syntax tree. To present it in small chunks, the traversal is broken into the main method, gencode(), and helper methods for each non-terminal. In Unicon, the gencode() method in tree.icn looks as follows:

method gencode()
  every (!\kids).gencode()
  case sym of...