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

Checking for undeclared variables

To find undeclared variables, check the symbol table on each variable that’s used for assignment or dereferencing. These reads and writes of memory occur in the executable statements and the expressions whose values are computed within those statements. Given a syntax tree, how do you find them?

The answer is to use tree traversals that look for IDENTIFIER tokens but only when they are in executable statements within blocks of code. To go about this, start from the top with a tree traversal that just finds the blocks of code. In Jzero, this is a traversal that finds the bodies of methods.

Identifying the bodies of methods

The check_codeblocks() method traverses the tree from the top to find all the method bodies, which is where the executable code is in Jzero. For every method declaration it finds, it calls another method called check_block() on that method’s body. In tree.icn, the Unicon version is:

method check_codeblocks...