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

Transpiling Jzero code to Unicon

All this talk about transpilers is all well and good, but seeing is believing. This section presents a transpiler implementation of the Jzero language, writing out Unicon code from the Jzero source code. The implementation is structured to resemble the tree traversal that is used to generate intermediate code in Chapter 9, so you might experience some déjà vu. But before we go there, consider what the transpiler code generator needs to do. As we’ve seen before, this involves a set of semantic attributes and a set of rules for how to compute them.

Semantic attributes for transpiling to Unicon

Our transpiler will introduce three semantic attributes. The first semantic attribute will be a representation of the output Unicon code. Like the icode attribute introduced for building a list of intermediate code instructions in Chapter 9, the transpiler implementation introduces an attribute named icncode that is used to build a list...