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

Questions

  1. Describe how intermediate code instructions with up to three addresses are converted into a sequence of stack machine instructions that contain at most one address.
  2. If a particular instruction (say it is instruction 15, at byte offset 120) is targeted by five different labels (for example, L2, L3, L5, L8, and L13), how are the labels processed when generating binary bytecode?
  3. In intermediate code, a method call consists of a sequence of PARM instructions followed by a CALL instruction. Does the described bytecode for doing a method call in bytecode match up well with the intermediate code? What is similar and what is different?
  4. CALL instructions in object-oriented (OO) languages such as Jzero are always preceded by a reference to the object (self or this) on which the methods are being invoked… or are they? Explain a situation in which the CALL method instruction may have no object reference, and how the code generator described in this chapter...