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

Debugging and environmental issues

This section contains information you may find useful when programming in Unicon. This includes a brief introduction to the Unicon debugger, some environment variables that you can set to modify Unicon runtime behavior, and a simple preprocessor that Unicon provides.

Learning the basics of the UDB debugger

Unicon’s source-level debugger is named udb and is described in UTR 10, which can be read at http://unicon.org/utr/utr10.html. udb's command set is based on that of gdb, which lives at https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/.

When you run udb, you provide the program to debug as a command-line argument. Alternatively, from within the debugger, you can run the load command to specify the program to debug. The debugger is normally exited using the quit (or q) command.

The udb prompt recognizes a lot of commands, often with an abbreviated form available. Perhaps after the quit command, the next most important command is help...