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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

Annotating syntax trees with labels for control flow

The code for some tree nodes will be sources or targets of control flow. To generate code, we need a way to generate the labels at the targets and propagate that information to the instructions that will go to those targets. It makes sense to start with the attribute named first. The first attribute holds a label to which branch instructions can jump to execute a given statement or expression. It can be synthesized by brute force if need be; if you had to, you could just allocate a unique label to each tree node. The result would be replete with redundant and unused labels, but it would work. For most nodes, the first label can be synthesized from one of their children, instead of allocating a new one.

Consider the additive expression e1 + e2, which builds a non-terminal named AddExpr. If there was any code in e1, it would have a first field, and that would be the label to use for the first field of the entire AddExpr. If e1...

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