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

Creating leaves from terminal symbols

Leaves make up a large percentage of the nodes in a syntax tree. The leaves in a syntax tree built by yacc come from the lexical analyzer. For this reason, this section discusses modifications to the code from Chapter 2, Programming Language Design. After you create leaves in the lexical analyzer, the parsing algorithm must pick them up somehow and plug them into the tree that it builds. This section describes that process in detail. First, you will learn how to embed token structures into tree leaves, and you will then learn how these leaves are picked up by the parser in its value stack. For Java, you will need to know about an extra type that is needed to work with the value stack. Lastly, the section provides some guidance as to which leaves are necessary and which can be safely omitted. Here is how to create leaves containing token information.

Wrapping tokens in leaves

The tree type presented earlier contains a field that is a reference...