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

Summary

This book showed you a thing or two about building programming languages. We did this by showing you an implementation of a toy language called Jzero. However, Jzero is not what is interesting; what is interesting is the tools and techniques used in its implementation. We even implemented it twice!

If you thought that maybe programming language design and implementation was a swimming pool to enjoy, your new conclusion might be that it is more like an ocean. If so, the tools that have been placed at your disposal in this book, including versions of flex and YACC for use with Unicon or Java, are a luxury cruise liner capable of sailing you about on that ocean to wherever you want to go.

The first high-level language compiler is said to have taken 18 person-years to create. Perhaps now it is a task of a few months, although it is still an open-ended task where you can spend as much time as you can spare making improvements to any compiler or interpreter that you care...