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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 solving modern computing problems

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800204805
Length 494 pages
Edition 1st 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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Toc

Table of Contents (25) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Programming Language Frontends
2. Chapter 1: Why Build Another Programming Language? FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Programming Language Design 4. Chapter 3: Scanning Source Code 5. Chapter 4: Parsing 6. Chapter 5: Syntax Trees 7. Section 2: Syntax Tree Traversals
8. Chapter 6: Symbol Tables 9. Chapter 7: Checking Base Types 10. Chapter 8: Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses 11. Chapter 9: Intermediate Code Generation 12. Chapter 10: Syntax Coloring in an IDE 13. Section 3: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
14. Chapter 11: Bytecode Interpreters 15. Chapter 12: Generating Bytecode 16. Chapter 13: Native Code Generation 17. Chapter 14: Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions 18. Chapter 15: Domain Control Structures 19. Chapter 16: Garbage Collection 20. Chapter 17: Final Thoughts 21. Section 4: Appendix
22. Assessments 23. Other Books You May Enjoy Appendix: Unicon Essentials

Handling package and class scopes in Unicon

Creating symbol tables for Jzero considers two scopes: class and local. Since Jzero does not do instances, Jzero's class scope is static and lexical. A larger, real-world language has to do more work to handle scopes. Java, for example, has to distinguish when a symbol declared in the class scope is a reference to a variable shared across all instances of the class, and when the symbol is a normal member variable that's been allocated separately for each instance of the class. In the case of Jzero, an isMember Boolean can be added to the symbol table entries to distinguish member variables from class variables, similar to the isConst flag.

Unicon's implementation is a lot different than Jzero's. A summary of its symbol tables and class scopes allows for a fruitful comparison. Whatever it does similarly to Jzero might also be how other languages handle things. What Unicon does differently than Jzero, each language might...

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