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

Learning about trees

Mathematically, a tree is a kind of graph structure; it consists of nodes and edges that connect those nodes. All the nodes in a tree are connected. A single node at the top is called the root. Tree nodes can have zero or more children, and at most one parent. A tree node with zero children is called a leaf; most trees have a lot of leaves. A tree node that is not a leaf has one or more children and is called an internal node. Figure 5.1 shows an example tree with a root, two additional internal nodes, and five leaves:

Figure 5.1: A tree with a root, internal nodes, and leaves

Trees have a property called arity that specifies the maximum number of children that occur for any node in the tree. An arity of 1 would give you a linked list. Perhaps the most common kinds of trees are binary trees (arity = 2). The kind of trees we need has as many children as there are symbols on the right-hand side of the rules in our grammar; these are so-called n-ary...