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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By : Daniel Ruoso
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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By: Daniel Ruoso

Overview of this book

Designing a custom programming language can be the most effective way to solve certain types of problems—especially when precision, safety, or domain-specific expressiveness matters. This book guides you through the full process of designing and implementing your own programming language and interpreter, from language design to execution, using modern C++. You’ll start by exploring when and why building a domain-specific language is worth it, and how to design one to fit a specific problem domain. Along the way, you’ll examine real-world interpreter architectures and see how their design decisions affect language behavior, capabilities, and runtime trade-offs. The book then walks through the entire process of interpreter implementation: defining syntax, building a lexer and parser, designing an abstract syntax tree, generating executable instructions, and implementing a runtime. All examples are in modern C++, with a focus on clean architecture and real-world usability. By the end, you’ll have a fully working interpreter for a domain-specific language designed to handle network protocols—plus the knowledge and tools to design your own programming language from scratch. *Email sign-up and proof of purchase required
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
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1
Modeling the Programming Language Runtime Environment
7
Modeling the Programming Language Syntax
12
Implementing the Interpreter Runtime
16
Interpreting Source Code
24
Index

Lexing: Turning Text into a Stream of Tokens

Now that I have an interpreter runtime capable of executing the instructions that my programming language needs, it is time to start the process of transforming source code into those instructions.

The first step in this process transforms the sequence of characters into a sequence of typed tokens. This allows the subsequent steps to work at a higher level of abstraction than plain text, simplifying the process of specifying the language grammar.

In this chapter, I will do the following:

  • Identify the different types of tokens in the language and the data each needs to store
  • Specify the rules for how those tokens are matched
  • Evaluate different libraries that can be used to implement a lexer and compare them with writing one from scratch
  • Implement the actual process that transforms a sequence of characters into a sequence of tokens

By the end of this chapter, you will have practical experience...

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