You're reading from Build Your Own Programming Language A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for modern computing problems

Product type Paperback

Published in Jan 2024

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781804618028

Length 556 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Java

Tools

Java EE

Concepts

Programming Language

Author (1):

Clinton L. Jeffery

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Table of Contents (27) Chapters

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

Determining the kinds of words and punctuation to provide in your language

Programming languages have several different categories of words and punctuation. In natural language, words are categorized into parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. The categories that correspond to the parts of speech that you will have to invent for a programming language can be constructed by doing the following:

Defining a set of reserved words or keywords
Specifying characters in identifiers that name variables, functions, and constants
Creating a format for literal constant values for built-in data types
Defining single and multi-letter operators and punctuation marks

You should write down precise descriptions of each of these categories as part of your language design document. In some cases, you might just make lists of particular words or punctuation to use, but in other cases, you will need patterns or some other way to convey what is...