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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

Review of Programming Language Paradigms

In this chapter, I will do a brief review of the major programming language paradigms, contrasting them through examples. When designing a new language, you will have to make design decisions about how much each paradigm helps you solve the particular problems of your domain. We will work through the following concepts:

  • How imperative programming allows the straightforward execution of instructions in a direct order
  • How functional programming leaves a large space for the compiler to decide the best way to execute the program
  • How declarative programming allows expressing complex state machines and rules in a way that abstracts away that complexity
  • How logic programming allows specifying constraints and requirements without having to specify the instructions necessary to evaluate them
  • The paradigm that works best for the use case we’re focusing on

By the end of this chapter, you will have a framework...

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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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