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 Trees

The preceding two chapters covered lexical and syntax analysis, the first two phases of a compiler. Next, we will need to perform semantic analysis and code generation, but those phases will need some information to work from. The parser we constructed in the last chapter can detect and report syntax errors, which is a big, important job. When there is no syntax error, you need to build a data structure during parsing that represents the whole program logically. This data structure is based on how the different tokens and larger pieces of the program are grouped together. A syntax tree is a tree data structure that records the branching structure of the grammar rules used by the parsing algorithm to check the syntax of an input source file. A branch occurs whenever two or more symbols are grouped together on the right-hand side of a grammar rule to build a non-terminal symbol. This chapter will show you how to build syntax trees, which are the central data structures...