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

Regular expressions

Regular expression notation is the most widely used way to describe patterns of symbols within files. They are formulated from very simple rules that are easy to understand. The set of symbols over which a set of regular expressions is written is called the alphabet. For simplicity, in this book, the values 0-255 that can be held in one byte will be our alphabet for reading source code.In some sets of input symbols, regular expressions are patterns that describe sets of strings using the members of the input symbol set and a few regular expression operators. Since they are a notation for sets, terms such as member, union, or intersection apply when talking about the sets of strings that regular expressions can match. We will look at the rules for building regular expressions in this section, followed by examples.

Regular expression rules

Over the years many different tools have used regular expressions, featuring many non-standard extensions to the notation. This...