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Build Your Own Programming Language

Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition

By : Clinton L. Jeffery
4.5 (33)
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Build Your Own Programming Language

Build Your Own Programming Language

4.5 (33)
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)
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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

Scanning Source Code

The first step in any programming language is reading the individual characters of the input source code and figuring out which characters are grouped together. In a natural language, this would include looking at the adjacent sequences of letters to identify the words. In a programming language, clusters of characters form variable names, reserved words, or sometimes operators or punctuation marks that are several characters long. This chapter will teach you how to read source code and identify the words and punctuation from the raw characters using pattern matching.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • Lexemes, lexical categories, and tokens
  • Regular expressions
  • Using UFlex and JFlex
  • Writing a scanner for Jzero
  • Regular expressions are not always enough

First, let’s look at the several kinds of words that appear in program source code. A natural language reader must distinguish...

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