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Build Your Own Programming Language

You're reading from   Build Your Own Programming Language A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for modern computing problems

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2024
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781804618028
Length 556 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Clinton  L. Jeffery Clinton L. Jeffery
Author Profile Icon Clinton L. Jeffery
Clinton L. Jeffery
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Table of Contents (27) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section I: Programming Language Frontends
2. Why Build Another Programming Language? FREE CHAPTER 3. Programming Language Design 4. Scanning Source Code 5. Parsing 6. Syntax Trees 7. Section II: Syntax Tree Traversals
8. Symbol Tables 9. Checking Base Types 10. Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses 11. Intermediate Code Generation 12. Syntax Coloring in an IDE 13. Section III: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
14. Preprocessors and Transpilers 15. Bytecode Interpreters 16. Generating Bytecode 17. Native Code Generation 18. Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions 19. Domain Control Structures 20. Garbage Collection 21. Final Thoughts 22. Section IV: Appendix
23. Answers
24. Other Books You May Enjoy
25. Index
Appendix: Unicon Essentials

Understanding what bytecode is

Bytecode is a sequence of machine instructions encoded in a binary format and written not for a CPU to execute, but instead for an abstract (or virtual) machine instruction set that embodies the semantics of a given programming language. Although many bytecode instruction sets for languages such as Java use a byte as the smallest instruction size, almost all of them include longer instructions. Such longer instructions have one or more operands. Since many kinds of operands must be aligned at a word boundary with an address that is a multiple of four or eight, a better name for many forms of bytecode might be wordcode. The term bytecode is commonly used for such abstract machines, regardless of the instruction’s size.

The languages that are directly responsible for popularizing bytecode are Pascal and SmallTalk. These languages adopted bytecode for different reasons that remain important considerations for programming languages that are defined...

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