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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the crucial technical skills and tools needed to build a syntax tree while the input program is being parsed. A syntax tree is the main data structure used to represent source code internally to a compiler or interpreter.

You learned how to develop code that identifies which production rule was used to build each internal node so that we can tell what we are looking at later on. You learned how to add tree node constructors for each rule in the scanner. You learned how to connect tree leaves from the scanner to the tree built in the parser. You also learned how to check your trees and debug common tree construction problems.

You are done synthesizing the input source code to construct a data structure that you can use. Now, it is time to start analyzing the meaning of the program source code so that you can determine what computations it specifies. This is done by walking through the parse tree using tree traversals to perform semantic...