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

Developing operators and functions for Unicon

Unicon is a very high-level language with many built-in features. For such languages, it will make sense to do some engineering work to simplify creating its runtime system. The purpose of this section is to share a bit about how this was done for Unicon, for comparison purposes. Unicon’s operators and built-in functions are implemented using RTL, which stands for Runtime Language.

RTL is a superset of C developed by Ken Walker to facilitate type inference in the Icon runtime system; Unicon inherits it from Icon. RTL writes out C code, so it is almost a very specialized form of C preprocessor that maintains a database in support of type inferencing.

Operators and functions in RTL look like C code, with many pieces of special syntax. There is syntax support for associating different pieces of C code, depending on the data type of the operands. To allow for type inferencing, the Unicon result type that’s produced by...