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

Function mini-reference

This section describes a subset of Unicon’s built-in functions deemed most likely to be relevant to programming language implementers. For a full list, see Appendix A of Programming with Unicon. The parameters’ required types in this section are given by their names. The names c or cs indicate a character set. The names s or str indicate a string. The names i or j indicate integers. A name such as x or any indicates that the parameter may be of any type. Such names may be suffixed with a number to distinguish them from other parameters of the same type. The colons and types after the parameters indicate return types, along with the number of returned values. Normally, a function will have exactly one return value. A question mark indicates that the function is a predicate that can fail with zero or one return value. An asterisk indicates that the function is a generator with zero or more return values.

Many functions also have default values...