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

Using lexical information to colorize tokens

Programmers need all the help they can get with reading, understanding, and debugging their programs. In Figure 10.1, the source code is presented in many different colors to enhance its readability. This coloring is based on the lexical categories of different elements of the text.

Although some people consider colored text as mere eye candy and others are not able to see colors at all, most programmers value it. Many forms of typos and text-editing bugs are spotted more quickly when a given piece of the source code is a different color than the programmer expected. For this reason, almost all modern programmer’s editors and IDEs include this feature.

Extending the EditableTextList component to support color

EditableTextList is a Unicon GUI component that displays the visible portion of a list of strings using a single font and color selection. EditableTextList does not allow the setting of a font or foreground and...