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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By : Daniel Ruoso
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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By: Daniel Ruoso

Overview of this book

Designing a custom programming language can be the most effective way to solve certain types of problems—especially when precision, safety, or domain-specific expressiveness matters. This book guides you through the full process of designing and implementing your own programming language and interpreter, from language design to execution, using modern C++. You’ll start by exploring when and why building a domain-specific language is worth it, and how to design one to fit a specific problem domain. Along the way, you’ll examine real-world interpreter architectures and see how their design decisions affect language behavior, capabilities, and runtime trade-offs. The book then walks through the entire process of interpreter implementation: defining syntax, building a lexer and parser, designing an abstract syntax tree, generating executable instructions, and implementing a runtime. All examples are in modern C++, with a focus on clean architecture and real-world usability. By the end, you’ll have a fully working interpreter for a domain-specific language designed to handle network protocols—plus the knowledge and tools to design your own programming language from scratch. *Email sign-up and proof of purchase required
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
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1
Modeling the Programming Language Runtime Environment
7
Modeling the Programming Language Syntax
12
Implementing the Interpreter Runtime
16
Interpreting Source Code
24
Index

Summary

The lexical pad is the name we give to the mechanism by which an interpreter or a compiler maps a name in the code to the container that holds the corresponding value.

Different programming languages put different requirements on the compiler or interpreter on what should be possible in terms of how the lexical pad can be queried and manipulated. There are areas of the code that have uniform visibility of names, which are called the lexical scopes for that particular programming language.

Some languages, such as Python, have the scope matching the body of a function. Any variable defined in a function is visible for the entire duration of the function. Other languages, such as C++, have the scope narrowed down to a particular block of code, meaning the language gives finer-grained control to the user of the life cycle of the variables.

In addition to those two choices, languages that support some functional idioms also support closure scopes, where a variable that...

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