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

Testing and debugging symbol tables

You can test your symbol tables by writing many test cases and verifying whether they obtain the expected undeclared or redeclared variable error messages. But nothing says confidence like an actual visual depiction of your symbol tables.

If you have built your symbol tables correctly by following the guidance in this chapter, then there should be a tree of symbol tables. You can print out your symbol tables using the same tree printing techniques that were used to verify your syntax trees in the previous chapter, using either a textual representation or a graphical one.

Symbol tables are slightly more work to traverse than syntax trees. To output the symbol table, you need to output information for the table and then visit all the children, not just look one up by name. Also, there are two classes involved: symtab and symtab_entry. Suppose you start at the root symbol table. In Unicon, to iterate through all the symbol tables, use the...