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

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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

Writing a scanner for Jzero

In this section, we will build a scanner for Jzero, our subset of the Java language. This extends the previous simple2 example to a realistic language size and adds column information, as well as additional lexical attributes for literal constants. The big change is the introduction of many regular expressions for more complex patterns than what we've seen previously. The entire Java language is recognized, but a significant fraction of Java categories cause executions to terminate with an error so that our grammar in the next chapter, along with the rest of the compiler, does not have to consider them.

The Jzero flex specification

Compared to the previous examples, a real programming language lex specification will have a lot more, and more complicated, regular expressions. The following file is called javalex.l and it will be presented in several pieces.The beginning of javalex.l includes the header and the regular expressions for comments and whitespace...