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

Writing a scanner for Jzero

In this section, we will build a scanner for Jzero, our subset of the Java language. This extends the previous simple2 example to a realistic language size and adds column information, as well as additional lexical attributes for literal constants. The big change is the introduction of many regular expressions for more complex patterns than what we've seen previously. The entire Java language is recognized, but a significant fraction of Java categories cause executions to terminate with an error so that our grammar in the next chapter, along with the rest of the compiler, does not have to consider them.

The Jzero flex specification

Compared to the previous examples, a real programming language lex specification will have a lot more, and more complicated, regular expressions. The following file is called javalex.l and it will be presented in several pieces.The beginning of javalex.l includes the header and the regular expressions for comments and whitespace...