The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software.
In this book, you’ll start with implementing the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how domain-specific language features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. We’ll conclude with how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts where relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow the code of your choice of either a very high-level language with advanced features, or a mainstream language.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs.
Perform requirements analysis for the new language and design language syntax and semantics
Write lexical and context-free grammar rules for common expressions and control structures
Develop a scanner that reads source code and generate a parser that checks syntax
Build key data structures in a compiler and use your compiler to build a syntax-coloring code editor
Implement a bytecode interpreter and run bytecode generated by your compiler
Write tree traversals that insert information into the syntax tree
Implement garbage collection in your language