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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

Symbol Tables

To understand the uses of names in program source code, your compiler must figure out what each use of a name refers to. If the program is reading from or writing to a variable, which variable is it? A local variable? A global variable? Or maybe a class member? You can look up symbols at each location they are used by using table data structures that are auxiliary to the syntax tree, called symbol tables. Performing operations to construct and then use symbol tables is the first step of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis is where the compiler studies the meaning of the input source code. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 will build on this chapter and round out our discussion of semantic analysis.

Context-free grammars, explored in the preceding two chapters of this book, have terminal symbols and non-terminal symbols, and those are represented in tree nodes and token structures. When talking about a program’s source code and its semantics, the word symbol is used...

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