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

Technical requirements

This chapter will take you through some real technical content. You can download this book’s examples from our GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Build-Your-Own-Programming-Language-Second-Editon/tree/master/ch3. The Code in Action video for the chapter can be found here: https://bit.ly/3Fnn2c2.

To follow along, you will need to install some tools and download the examples. Let’s start by looking at how to install UFlex and JFlex. UFlex comes with Unicon and requires no separate installation.

For JFlex, download jflex-1.9.1.tar.gz (or newer) from http://jflex.de/download.html. Depending on your version of the tar(1) program, you may have to first decompress it with gunzip, converting the file from a .tar.gz file into a .tar file. You can get gunzip from places such as www.gzip.org/ or gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm.

After that, you can then extract the files from the .tar file with tar. It will extract...