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

Understanding 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...