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Build Your Own Programming Language

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

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2024
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781804618028
Length 556 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Tools
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Author (1):
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Clinton  L. Jeffery Clinton L. Jeffery
Author Profile Icon Clinton L. Jeffery
Clinton L. Jeffery
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Toc

Table of Contents (27) Chapters Close

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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned the difference between inventing a programming language and inventing a library API to support whatever kinds of computing you want to do. Several different forms of programming language implementations were considered. This first chapter allowed you to think about functional and non-functional requirements for your own language.

These requirements might be different for your language than the example requirements discussed for the Java subset Jzero and the Unicon programming language, which were both introduced.

Requirements are important because they allow you to set goals and define what success will look like. In the case of a programming language implementation, the requirements include what things will look and feel like for the programmers that use your language, as well as what hardware and software platforms it must run on. The look and feel of a programming language include answering both external questions regarding how the language implementation and the programs written in the language are invoked, as well as internal issues such as verbosity: how much the programmer must write to accomplish a given compute task.

You may be keen to get straight to the coding part. Although the classic build-and-fix mentality of novice programmers might work on scripts and short programs, for a piece of software as large as a programming language, we need a bit more planning first. After this chapter’s coverage of the requirements, Chapter 2, Programming Language Design, will prepare you to construct a detailed plan for the implementation, which will occupy our attention for the remainder of this book!

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Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition
Published in: Jan 2024
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781804618028
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