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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

Creating and populating symbol tables for each scope

A symbol table contains a record of all the names that are declared for a scope. There is one symbol table for each scope. A symbol table provides a means of looking up symbols by their name to obtain information about them. If a variable was declared, the symbol table lookup returns a record with all the information known about that symbol: where it was declared, what its data type is, whether it is public or private, and so on. All this information can be found in the syntax tree. If we also place it in a table, the goal is to access the information directly, from anywhere else that information is needed.

The traditional implementation of a symbol table is a hash table, which provides a very fast information lookup. Your compiler could use any data structure that allows you to store or retrieve information associated with a symbol, even a linked list. But hash tables are the best for this, and they are standard in Unicon and...

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