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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

Difference between a parse tree and an abstract syntax tree

When implementing a parser, the primary concern is having a structure that correctly represents how the syntax of the language is laid out in text. When generating code, however, you need a representation that more precisely describes the semantics of the code.

The term we use for that second structure is abstract syntax tree (AST). It’s referred to as abstract because it’s not yet concrete execution code, nor is it a parse tree.

A parse tree must represent aspects that are specific to the rules of the grammar, even if those end up not being how the code itself is going to be executed. On the other hand, an AST abstracts away grammar-related details.

For instance, the parse tree for the language that I have been building is focused on the messages and the elements that form them. But what the language is actually describing is two different state machines—one for the server and one for the...

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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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