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

In this chapter, you learned how to generate intermediate code. Generating intermediate code is the first vital step in synthesizing the instructions that will eventually allow a machine to run the user’s program. The skills you learned in this chapter build on the skills that are used in semantic analysis, such as how to add semantic attributes to the syntax tree nodes, and how to traverse syntax tree nodes in complex ways as needed.

One of the important features of this chapter was an example intermediate code instruction set that we used for the Jzero language. Since the code is abstract, you can add new instructions to this instruction set as needed for your language. Building lists of these instructions was easy using Unicon’s list data type or Java’s ArrayList type.

The chapter showed you how to generate code for straight-line expressions such as arithmetic calculations. Far more effort in this chapter went into the instructions for control...