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 Base Types

This is the first of two chapters about type checking. In most mainstream programming languages, type checking is a key aspect of semantic analysis that must be performed before you can generate code. Type checking uses the syntax trees from Chapter 5 and the symbol tables from Chapter 6.

This chapter will show you how to do simple type checks for the base types included in the Jzero subset of Java. A by-product of checking the types is adding type information to the syntax tree. Knowing the types of operands in the syntax tree enables you to generate correct instructions for various operations. For example, if your compiler sees the code x + y, should it generate code for integer addition? Floating-point addition? Something else?

This chapter covers the following main topics:

  • Type representation in the compiler
  • Assigning type information to declared variables
  • Determining the type at each syntax tree node
  • Runtime type checks...