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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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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

Specifying the control flow

The control flow is how the program's execution proceeds from place to place within the source code. Most control flow constructs should be familiar to programmers who have been trained in mainstream programming languages. The innovations in your language design can then focus on the features that are novel or domain-specific and that motivate you to create a new language in the first place. Make these novel things as simple and as readable as possible. Envision how those new features ought to fit into the rest of the programming language.

Every language must have conditionals and loops, and almost all of them use if and while to start them. You could invent your own special syntax for an if expression, but unless you've got a good reason to, you would be shooting yourself in the foot. Here are some control flow constructs from Java that would certainly be in Jzero:

if (e) s;
if (e) s1 else s2;
while (e) s;
for (…) s;

Here are some...

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