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

Developing operators and functions for Unicon

Unicon is a very high-level language with many built-in features. For such languages, it will make sense to do some engineering work to simplify creating its runtime system. The purpose of this section is to share a bit about how this was done for Unicon, for comparison purposes. Unicon’s operators and built-in functions are implemented using RTL, which stands for Runtime Language.

RTL is a superset of C developed by Ken Walker to facilitate type inference in the Icon runtime system; Unicon inherits it from Icon. RTL writes out C code, so it is almost a very specialized form of C preprocessor that maintains a database in support of type inferencing.

Operators and functions in RTL look like C code, with many pieces of special syntax. There is syntax support for associating different pieces of C code, depending on the data type of the operands. To allow for type inferencing, the Unicon result type that’s produced by...