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

Context-free grammars

In this section, we will define a notation used by programming language inventors to describe the syntax of their language. You will be able to use what you learn in this section to supply syntax rules as input to the parser generators used in the next section. Let’s begin by understanding what context-free grammars are.

Context-free grammars are the most widely used notation for describing the syntax allowed in a programming language in terms of patterns of lexemes. They are formulated from very simple rules that are easy to understand. Context-free grammars are built from the following components:

  • Terminal symbols: A set of input symbols are called terminal symbols. Terminal symbols in a grammar are read in from a scanner such as the one we produced in the last chapter. Although they are referred to as symbols, terminal symbols correspond to an entire word, operator, or punctuation mark; a terminal symbol identifies the category of a lexeme...