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

Symbol Tables

To understand the uses of names in program source code, your compiler must figure out what each use of a name refers to. If the program is reading from or writing to a variable, which variable is it? A local variable? A global variable? Or maybe a class member? You can look up symbols at each location they are used by using table data structures that are auxiliary to the syntax tree, called symbol tables. Performing operations to construct and then use symbol tables is the first step of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis is where the compiler studies the meaning of the input source code. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 will build on this chapter and round out our discussion of semantic analysis.

Context-free grammars, explored in the preceding two chapters of this book, have terminal symbols and non-terminal symbols, and those are represented in tree nodes and token structures. When talking about a program’s source code and its semantics, the word symbol is used...