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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

Analyzing: Turning a Parse Tree into an Abstract Syntax Tree

The parse tree doesn’t necessarily present itself in a way that makes it easy to process what the code is meant to do. Oftentimes, it contains redundant information or is organized in a way that is focused on allowing the grammar to be specified in a non-ambiguous way. Therefore, before we generate actual instructions, we need to transform the parse tree into a data structure that better represents the semantics of the language.

In this chapter, I will focus on the process of producing a representation of the code that represents the semantics of the execution of the code, even if it doesn’t yet correspond to the actual interpreter operations. This will include the following:

  • Exploring the differences between the parse tree and the abstract syntax tree and the different roles they play
  • Modeling the types that we need to represent the semantics of the language
  • Going through the code...
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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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