You're reading from Build Your Own Programming Language A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for modern computing problems

Product type Paperback

Published in Jan 2024

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781804618028

Length 556 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Java

Tools

Java EE

Concepts

Programming Language

Author (1):

Clinton L. Jeffery

View More author details

Table of Contents (27) Chapters

Preface

1. Section I: Programming Language Frontends

2. Why Build Another Programming Language? FREE CHAPTER

3. Programming Language Design

4. Scanning Source Code

5. Parsing

6. Syntax Trees

7. Section II: Syntax Tree Traversals

8. Symbol Tables

9. Checking Base Types

10. Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses

11. Intermediate Code Generation

12. Syntax Coloring in an IDE

13. Section III: Code Generation and Runtime Systems

14. Preprocessors and Transpilers

15. Bytecode Interpreters

16. Generating Bytecode

17. Native Code Generation

18. Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions

19. Domain Control Structures

20. Garbage Collection

21. Final Thoughts

22. Section IV: Appendix

23. Answers

24. Other Books You May Enjoy

25. Index

Appendix: Unicon Essentials

Using GNU Make

Command lines are growing longer and longer, and you will get very tired of typing the commands required to build a programming language. We are already using Unicon, Java, uflex, jflex, iyacc, and BYACC/J. Few tools for building large programs are multi-platform and multi-language enough for this toolset. We will use the ultimate multi-platform, multi-language software build tool: GNU Make.

Once the Make program is installed on your path, you can store the build rules for Unicon or Java, or both, in a file named a makefile (or Makefile), and then just run Make whenever you have changed the code and need to rebuild. A full treatment of Make is beyond the scope of this book, but here are the key points.

A makefile is like a lex or yacc specification, except instead of recognizing patterns of strings, a makefile specifies a graph of build dependencies between files. For each file, the makefile contains the source files it depends on as well as a list of one or...