Constructing Language Processors For Little Languages

"Little languages" are specialty languages that can help programmers streamline the development of specific applications. This text, written for experienced programmers, serves as a step-by-step guide to developing compilers and interpreters for "little languages".

This book provides a gently paced introduction to techniques for implementing programming languages by means of compilers and interpreters, using the object-oriented programming language Java. The book aims to exemplify good software engineering principles at the same time as explaining the specific techniques needed to build compilers and interpreters.

A compiler translates a program written in a high level language into a program written in a lower level language. For students of computer science, building a compiler from scratch is a rite of passage: a challenging and fun project that offers insight into many different aspects of computer science, some deeply theoretical, and others highly practical. This book offers a one semester introduction into compiler construction, enabling the reader to build a simple compiler that accepts a C-like language and translates it into working X86 or ARM assembly language. It is most suitable for undergraduate students who have some experience programming in C, and have taken courses in data structures and computer architecture.

The book emphasizes the design of full-fledged, fully normalizing lambda calculus machinery, as opposed to the just weakly normalizing machines.

Maintaining a balance between a theoretical and practical approach to this important subject, Elements of Compiler Design serves as an introduction to compiler writing for undergraduate students. From a theoretical viewpoint, it introduces rudimental models, such as automata and grammars, that underlie compilation and its essential phases. Based on

Written by the creator of the Unicon programming language, this book will show you how to implement programming languages to reduce the time and cost of creating applications for new or specialized areas of computing Key Features Reduce development time and solve pain points in your application domain by building a custom programming language Learn how to create parsers, code generators, file readers, analyzers, and interpreters Create an alternative to frameworks and libraries to solve domain-specific problems Book Description The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software. In this book, you'll start with implementing the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you'll learn how domain-specific language features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. We'll conclude with how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts where relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow the code of your choice of either a very high-level language with advanced features, or a mainstream language. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs. What you will learn Perform requirements analysis for the new language and design language syntax and semantics Write lexical and context-free grammar rules for common expressions and control structures Develop a scanner that reads source code and generate a parser that checks syntax Build key data structures in a compiler and use your compiler to build a syntax-coloring code editor Implement a bytecode interpreter and run bytecode generated by your compiler Write tree traversals that insert information into the syntax tree Implement garbage collection in your language Who this book is for This book is for software developers interested in the idea of inventing their own language or developing a domain-specific language. Computer science students taking compiler construction courses will also find this book highly useful as a practical guide to language implementation to supplement more theoretical textbooks. Intermediate-level knowledge and experience working with a high-level language such as Java or the C++ language are expected to help you get the most out of this book.

Formal Languages and Computation: Models and Their Applications gives a clear, comprehensive introduction to formal language theory and its applications in computer science. It covers all rudimental topics concerning formal languages and their models, especially grammars and automata, and sketches the basic ideas underlying the theory of computation, including computability, decidability, and computational complexity. Emphasizing the relationship between theory and application, the book describes many real-world applications, including computer science engineering techniques for language processing and their implementation. Covers the theory of formal languages and their models, including all essential concepts and properties Explains how language models underlie language processors Pays a special attention to programming language analyzers, such as scanners and parsers, based on four language models—regular expressions, finite automata, context-free grammars, and pushdown automata Discusses the mathematical notion of a Turing machine as a universally accepted formalization of the intuitive notion of a procedure Reviews the general theory of computation, particularly computability and decidability Considers problem-deciding algorithms in terms of their computational complexity measured according to time and space requirements Points out that some problems are decidable in principle, but they are, in fact, intractable problems for absurdly high computational requirements of the algorithms that decide them In short, this book represents a theoretically oriented treatment of formal languages and their models with a focus on their applications. It introduces all formalisms concerning them with enough rigors to make all results quite clear and valid. Every complicated mathematical passage is preceded by its intuitive explanation so that even the most complex parts of the book are easy to grasp. After studying this book, both student and professional should be able to understand the fundamental theory of formal languages and computation, write language processors, and confidently follow most advanced books on the subject.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Formal Engineering methods, ICFEM 2002, held in Shanghai, China, in October 2002. The 43 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with 5 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 108 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on component engineering and software architecture, method integration, specification techniques and languages, tools and environments, refinement, applications, validation and verification, UML, and semantics.

The classic guide to how computers work, updated with new chapters and interactive graphics "For me, Code was a revelation. It was the first book about programming that spoke to me. It started with a story, and it built up, layer by layer, analogy by analogy, until I understood not just the Code, but the System. Code is a book that is as much about Systems Thinking and abstractions as it is about code and programming. Code teaches us how many unseen layers there are between the computer systems that we as users look at every day and the magical silicon rocks that we infused with lightning and taught to think." - Scott Hanselman, Partner Program Director, Microsoft, and host of Hanselminutes Computers are everywhere, most obviously in our laptops and smartphones, but also our cars, televisions, microwave ovens, alarm clocks, robot vacuum cleaners, and other smart appliances. Have you ever wondered what goes on inside these devices to make our lives easier but occasionally more infuriating? For more than 20 years, readers have delighted in Charles Petzold's illuminating story of the secret inner life of computers, and now he has revised it for this new age of computing. Cleverly illustrated and easy to understand, this is the book that cracks the mystery. You'll discover what flashlights, black cats, seesaws, and the ride of Paul Revere can teach you about computing, and how human ingenuity and our compulsion to communicate have shaped every electronic device we use. This new expanded edition explores more deeply the bit-by-bit and gate-by-gate construction of the heart of every smart device, the central processing unit that combines the simplest of basic operations to perform the most complex of feats. Petzold's companion website, CodeHiddenLanguage.com, uses animated graphics of key circuits in the book to make computers even easier to comprehend. In addition to substantially revised and updated content, new chapters include: Chapter 18: Let's Build a Clock! Chapter 21: The Arithmetic Logic Unit Chapter 22: Registers and Busses Chapter 23: CPU Control Signals Chapter 24: Jumps, Loops, and Calls Chapter 28: The World Brain From the simple ticking of clocks to the worldwide hum of the internet, Code reveals the essence of the digital revolution.