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

Product type Paperback

Published in Dec 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781800204805

Length 494 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Concepts

Programming Language

Author (1):

Clinton L. Jeffery

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Table of Contents (25) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Programming Language Frontends

2. Chapter 1: Why Build Another Programming Language? FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Programming Language Design

4. Chapter 3: Scanning Source Code

5. Chapter 4: Parsing

6. Chapter 5: Syntax Trees

7. Section 2: Syntax Tree Traversals

8. Chapter 6: Symbol Tables

9. Chapter 7: Checking Base Types

10. Chapter 8: Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses

11. Chapter 9: Intermediate Code Generation

12. Chapter 10: Syntax Coloring in an IDE

13. Section 3: Code Generation and Runtime Systems

14. Chapter 11: Bytecode Interpreters

15. Chapter 12: Generating Bytecode

16. Chapter 13: Native Code Generation

17. Chapter 14: Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions

18. Chapter 15: Domain Control Structures

19. Chapter 16: Garbage Collection

20. Chapter 17: Final Thoughts

21. Section 4: Appendix

22. Assessments

23. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Unicon Essentials

Creating leaves from terminal symbols

Leaves make up a large percentage of the nodes in a syntax tree. The leaves in a syntax tree built by yacc come from the lexical analyzer. For this reason, this section discusses modifications to the code from Chapter 2, Programming Language Design. After you create leaves in the lexical analyzer, the parsing algorithm must pick them up somehow and plug them into the tree that it builds. This section describes that process in detail. First, you will learn how to embed token structures into tree leaves, and you will then learn how these leaves are picked up by the parser in its value stack. For Java, you will need to know about an extra type that is needed to work with the value stack. Lastly, the section provides some guidance as to which leaves are really necessary and which can be safely omitted. Here is how to create leaves containing token information.