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

Implementing operators

Operators are expressions that compute a value. Simple operators that compute their results via a few instructions on the underlying machine were covered in the preceding chapters. This section describes how to implement an operator that takes many steps. You can call these operators composite operators. In this case, the underlying generated code may perform calls to functions that run natively on the underlying machine.

It may be useful to compare implementing composite operators that are built into to the language, as we are discussing in this chapter, with the feature of operator overloading in some languages such as C++. Operator overloading allows composite operators to be implemented, usually for new user-defined types, as part of a program’s source code. The purpose of operator overloading is usually to enable arbitrary new user-defined types to use the same concise arithmetic notation enjoyed by primitive atomic types in a language. However...