Writing Interactive Compilers And Interpreters

A simple yet practical examination of how to implement an interactive programming language. Reviews how techniques and challenges differ from traditional non-interactive languages; balances material for planning/performing the task with underlying theoretical principles; assumes no more than an ability to program and a familiarity with interactive working.

Long-awaited revision to a unique guide that covers both compilers and interpreters Revised, updated, and now focusing on Java instead of C++, this long-awaited, latest edition of this popular book teaches programmers and software engineering students how to write compilers and interpreters using Java. You?ll write compilers and interpreters as case studies, generating general assembly code for a Java Virtual Machine that takes advantage of the Java Collections Framework to shorten and simplify the code. In addition, coverage includes Java Collections Framework, UML modeling, object-oriented programming with design patterns, working with XML intermediate code, and more.

A practical guide to writing interpreters and compilers. Shows how to write a series of useful utilities, including an interactive debugging interpreter and a working compiler, in a top-down, incremental fashion. Hands-on approach encourages experimentation with these programs on a personal computer. Presentation is independent of operating system and compiler writing system. All the programs are written in the C language. Includes exercises.

Quickly master all the skills you need to build your own compilers and interpreters in C++ Whether you are a professional programmer who needs to write a compiler at work or a personal programmer who wants to write an interpreter for a language of your own invention, this book quickly gets you up and running with all the knowledge and skills you need to do it right. It cuts right to the chase with a series of skill-building exercises ranging in complexity from the basics of reading a program to advanced object-oriented techniques for building a compiler in C++. Here's how it works: Every chapter contains anywhere from one to three working utility programs that provide a firsthand demonstration of concepts discussed, and each chapter builds upon the preceding ones. You begin by learning how to read a program and produce a listing, deconstruct a program into tokens (scanning), and how to analyze it based on its syntax (parsing). From there, Ron Mak shows you step by step how to build an actual working interpreter and an interactive debugger. Once you've mastered those skills, you're ready to apply them to building a compiler that runs on virtually any desktop computer. Visit the Wiley Computer Books Web page at: http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/

Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.

This is a comprehensive account of the semantics and the implementation of the whole Lisp family of languages, namely Lisp, Scheme and related dialects. It describes 11 interpreters and 2 compilers, including very recent techniques of interpretation and compilation. The book is in two parts. The first starts from a simple evaluation function and enriches it with multiple name spaces, continuations and side-effects with commented variants, while at the same time the language used to define these features is reduced to a simple lambda-calculus. Denotational semantics is then naturally introduced. The second part focuses more on implementation techniques and discusses precompilation for fast interpretation: threaded code or bytecode; compilation towards C. Some extensions are also described such as dynamic evaluation, reflection, macros and objects. This will become the new standard reference for people wanting to know more about the Lisp family of languages: how they work, how they are implemented, what their variants are and why such variants exist. The full code is supplied (and also available over the Net). A large bibliography is given as well as a considerable number of exercises. Thus it may also be used by students to accompany second courses on Lisp or Scheme.