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

Establishing the groundwork for symbol tables

In software engineering, you must go through requirements analysis and design before you start coding. Similarly, to build symbol tables, you first need to understand what they are for and how to go about writing the syntax tree traversals that do the work. For starters, you should review what kinds of information your compiler must store and recall different kinds of variables. The information will be stored in symbol tables from declarations in the program code, so let’s look at those.

Declarations and scopes

The meaning of a computer program boils down to the meaning of the information being computed, and the actual computations to be performed. Symbol tables are all about the first part: defining what information the program is manipulating. We will begin by identifying what names are being used, what they are referring to, and how they are being used.

Consider a simple assignment statement such as the following...