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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

Interruptions to the control flow

It’s technically possible to always rewrite any control flow in terms of a stack machine. However, unless you have a specific technical reason to build your interpreter that way, it likely makes more sense to allow the control flow in the execution to be interrupted and moved around.One simple example of this would be in situations where you have a return statement deeply nested in several conditionals. It would be possible to reorganize the operations so that the execution always flows back through the stack machine, but it would likely be simpler to simply allow a “return” operation that interrupts the evaluation of the stack machine and simply unwinds a language stack frame directly.But return is just the simplest of the control flow interruptions that we see in most modern programming languages. Here are a few other cases:

  • Breaking out from a loop
  • Exception handling
  • Short-circuit...
CONTINUE READING
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Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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