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

Integrating built-ins with control structures

Control structures are usually bigger things than expressions, such as loops. They are often associated with novel programming language semantics or new scopes in which specialized computations occur. Control structures provide a context in which a statement (often, this is a compound statement consisting of a whole block of code) is executed. This can be whether (or how many times) it is executed, on what associated data the code is computing, or even what semantics to apply during the evaluation of the operators.

Sometimes, these control structures are explicitly and solely used for your new operators or built-in functions, but often, the interactions are implicit byproducts of the problem-solving that your language enables.

Whether a given block of code is executed, selecting which of several blocks to execute or executing code repeatedly are the most traditional control structures, such as if statements and loops. The most...