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

Understanding preprocessors

A preprocessor applies a transformation to source code. Some preprocessors are stand-alone tools, usable by and independent of any programming language tool. The most famous of these is probably the Unix m4 preprocessor. However, most preprocessors are tied to, associated directly with, and often integrated into a particular programming language and apply the transformation before the language compiler reads it in for lexical analysis. The output code from a preprocessor usually resembles its input with only a few changes, so you might wonder: why bother? Usually, the reason is that the judicious use of a preprocessor can make the code shorter and more readable.

A typical preprocessor transformation might be to replace all occurrences of some symbolic abbreviation such as PI with 3.1415. Another typical preprocessing example would be to expand some function-like syntax with parameters at compile-time, such as replacing occurrences of CUBED(X) with ...