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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

Testing and debugging symbol tables

You can test your symbol tables by writing many test cases and verifying whether they obtain the expected undeclared or redeclared variable error messages. But nothing says confidence like an actual visual depiction of your symbol tables. If you have built your symbol tables correctly by following the guidance in this chapter, then there should be a tree of symbol tables. You can print out your symbol tables using the same tree printing techniques that were used to verify your syntax trees in the previous chapter, using either a textual representation or a graphical one.

Symbol tables are slightly more work to traverse than syntax trees. To output the symbol table, you need to output information for the table and then visit all the children, not just look one up by name. Also, there are two classes involved: symtab and symtab_entry. Suppose you start at the root symbol table. In Unicon, to iterate through all the symbol tables, use the following...

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