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

Determining the type at each syntax tree node

Within the syntax tree, the nodes associated with actual code expressions in the method bodies have a type associated with the value that the expression computes. For example, if a tree node corresponds to the sum of adding two numbers, the tree node’s type is determined by the types of the operands and the rules of the language for the addition operator. Our goal for this section is to spell out how this type information can be calculated.

As you saw in the Type representation in the compiler section, the class for syntax tree nodes has an attribute to store that node’s type, if there is one. The type attribute is calculated bottom-up, during a post-order tree traversal. There is a similarity here to checking for undeclared variables, which we did in the previous chapter, in that the expressions that need types checked only occur in the bodies of functions. The call to invoke this type checking tree traversal, starting...