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

Code generation in the Unicon preprocessor

After the preprocessor, the rest of the Unicon translator takes Unicon input and outputs an extended dialect of Icon that has no name but is occasionally referred to as Icon’ (Icon prime). Unicon is written in around 7,000 lines of Unicon code and another 1,100 lines of iyacc specification. It is tiny compared to a conventional compiler, but ten times the size of the preprocessor’s preprocessor described in the previous section.

Transforming objects into classes

The output of Unicon frequently resembles the input closely enough to qualify as a preprocessor. Regular Icon code such as user-defined procedures with their statements and expressions pass through Unicon almost unmodified. However, the Unicon translator implements several language extensions by changing the source code. For example, packages are implemented via name mangling. You can see what Unicon does with a given input file foo.icn, if anything, by running...