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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

Parsing: Turning a Stream of Tokens into a Parse Tree

The sequence of tokens produced by the tokenizer is easier to work with than the raw text, but if you were to try and convert those tokens directly into operations, you’d find yourself struggling a lot. The reason for that is that most programming languages have a hierarchy of how the code is represented, and in order to understand the code, we need it to be represented at a higher level of abstraction.

In this chapter, I will focus on the process of converting a sequence of tokens into a parse tree, which is the name we give to the data structure representing how the code needs to be read. To do that, we will do the following:

  • Identify what data structures we need to represent the code in a way that encapsulates its hierarchy
  • Define a grammar that specifies how the tokens need to be matched in order to assemble those data structures
  • Evaluate different options of libraries and frameworks that help...
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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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