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

Evaluating expressions

Unicon expressions are goal-directed. When they can, they compute a result, and this is called success. Expressions that have no result are said to fail. Failure will generally prevent a surrounding expression from being performed. Generators are a special category of Unicon expressions that are capable of computing more than one result; they are described in a section later in this chapter.

Goal-directed evaluation semantics with generators eliminates the need for a Boolean data type, which is usually found in other languages. It also dramatically increases the expressive power of the language, avoiding the need for a lot of tedious checking for sentinel values or writing explicit loops to search for things that can be found by goal-directed evaluation and backtracking. It takes time to get used to this feature, but once mastered, code is shorter and quicker to write.

Forming expressions using operators

Many of Unicon’s operators will be...