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

Deciding on what kinds of data to support

There are at least three categories of data types to consider in your language design. The first one is atomic, scalar primitive types, often called first-class data types. The second is composite or container types, which hold and organize collections of values. The third (which may be variants of the first or second categories) is application domain-specific types. You should formulate a plan for each of these categories.

Atomic types

Atomic types are generally built-in and immutable. As the word immutable suggests, you cannot modify existing atomic values, only combine them to compute new values. Pretty much all languages have such built-in atomic types for numbers and a few additional types. A Boolean type, null type, and maybe a string type are common atomics, but some languages have others.You decide just how complicated to get with atomics: how many different machine representations of integers and real numbers do programs written in your...