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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

Defining the Scope

In this chapter, we will focus on defining the target programming language and interpreter that we will develop throughout this book. We will cover the following aspects:

  • Reflecting on the continuing desire to refine the programming language landscape with new ideas
  • Exploring how domain-specific languages help solve targeted problems
  • Understanding how building an interpreter can help to iterate on language design
  • Defining the use case that will serve as our exercise through this book
  • Discussing how this new language needs to interact with existing ecosystems

By the end of this chapter, you will have a new appreciation for the diversity of programming languages in our ecosystem. You will also be more knowledgeable about the project that will be developed throughout this book.

CONTINUE READING
83
Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
73
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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