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

Using UFlex and JFlex

Writing a scanner by hand is an interesting task for a programmer who wants to know exactly how everything works, but it will slow down the development of your language and make it more difficult to maintain the code afterward.Good news, everyone! A family of tools that originated as part of UNIX, known as lex, takes regular expressions and generates a scanner function for you. Lex-compatible tools are available for most popular programming languages. For C/C++, the most widely used lex-compatible tool is Flex, hosted at https://github.com/westes/flex/. For Unicon, we use UFlex, while for Java, you can use JFlex. These tools may have various custom extensions, but to the extent that they are compatible with UNIX lex, we can present them together as one language for writing scanners. This book's examples have been crafted carefully so that we can even use the same lex input for both the Unicon and Java implementation!The input files for lex are often called ...