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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
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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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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

Context-free grammars

In this section, we will define a notation used by programming language inventors to describe the syntax of their language. You will be able to use what you learn in this section to supply syntax rules as input to the parser generators used in the next section. Let’s begin by understanding what context-free grammars are.

Context-free grammars are the most widely used notation for describing the syntax allowed in a programming language in terms of patterns of lexemes. They are formulated from very simple rules that are easy to understand. Context-free grammars are built from the following components:

  • Terminal symbols: A set of input symbols are called terminal symbols. Terminal symbols in a grammar are read in from a scanner such as the one we produced in the last chapter. Although they are referred to as symbols, terminal symbols correspond to an entire word, operator, or punctuation mark; a terminal symbol identifies the category of a lexeme...
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