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

Debugging and testing your syntax tree

The trees that you build must be rock solid. What this spectacular mixed metaphor means is if your syntax tree structure is not built correctly, you can’t expect to be able to build the rest of your programming language. The most direct way of testing that the tree has been constructed correctly is to walk back through it and look at the tree that you have built. Actually, you need to do that for all possible trees!

This section contains two examples of traversing and printing the structure of syntax trees. You will print your tree first in a human-readable (more or less) ASCII text format, then you will learn how to print it out in a format that is easily rendered graphically using the popular open source Graphviz package, commonly accessed through PlantUML or the classic command-line tool called dot. First, consider some of the most common causes of problems in syntax trees.

Avoiding common syntax tree bugs

The most common...