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

Syntax analysis

As a programmer, you are probably already familiar with syntax error messages and the general idea of syntax, which is to understand what kinds of words or lexemes must appear, in what order, for a given communication to be well formed, which is to say grammatically correct, in a language. Most human languages are picky about this, while a few are very flexible about word order. Most programming languages are far simpler and more restrictive than natural human languages about what constitutes a legal input.

The input for syntax analysis consists of the output of the previous chapter on lexical analysis. Communication, such as a message or a program, is broken down into a sequence of component words and punctuation. This could be an array or list of token objects, although for parsing, all the algorithm requires is the sequence of integer codes returned from calls to yylex(), one after another. It is the job of syntax analysis to determine whether the communication...