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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

Making a function

The implementation currently just has the ability to transfer the control flow to a different operation tree. While it would be possible to represent a lot of different problems in this way, there are other capabilities that we normally associate with a function:

  • Executing a sequence of statements
  • Interrupting the control flow to leave the function immediately
  • Using variables and defining how their names are scoped

So far, every operation only executes once, and the shape of the execution is known by the static type of the argument tuple for the operator. Let’s look at the following example in Python:

print("Hello")
print("World!")

If we were to translate that into an operation tree, it would look something like this:

Figure 11.3: Operation tree for a sequence of statements

Figure 11.3: Operation tree for a sequence of statements

But if we tried to describe the “statement sequence” operator in the code as it is now, we would...

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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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