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

Type representation in the compiler

Frequently, our compiler will need to do things such as compare the types of two variables to see whether they are compatible. Program source code represents types with string data, which is incorporated in our syntax tree. In some languages, it might be possible to use little syntax subtrees to represent the types that are used in type checking, but in general, type information does not exactly correspond to a subtree within our syntax tree. This is because part of the type information is pulled in from elsewhere, such as another type. For this reason, we need a new data type specifically designed to represent the type information associated with any given value that is declared or computed in the program.

It would be nice if we could just represent types with an atomic value such as an integer code or a string type name. For example, we could use 1 for an integer, 2 for a real number, or 3 for a string. If a language had only a small, fixed...