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

In this chapter, you will need the following tools:

  • Iyacc, a parser generator for Unicon. Iyacc comes with all recent Unicon builds, so you should already have it.
  • BYACC/J, a parser generator for Java. BYACC/J is descended from Berkeley YACC, an open source YACC implementation. You can get the BYACC/J source code from SourceForge.net. Instructions are given below.

You can download this chapter’s code from our GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Build-Your-Own-Programming-Language-Second-Edition/tree/master/ch4.

The Code in Action video for the chapter can be found here: https://bit.ly/3ClVCSf.

At the time of writing, the BYACC/J source distribution on GitHub contains a command-line option that we will use that is not in the binary distributions or other source .zip distributions on that site. To obtain a copy of BYACC/J, first clone the Git via a command such as the following:

git clone https://git...