How to create a programming language

TABLE OF CONTENT

1. Table of Content
2. Introduction
1. Summary
2. About The Author
3. Before We Begin
3. Overview
1. The Four Parts of a Language
2. Meet Awesome: Our Toy Language
4. Lexer
1. Lex (Flex)
2. Ragel
3. Python Style Indentation For Awesome
4. Do It Yourself I
5. Parser
1. Bison (Yacc)
2. Lemon
3. ANTLR
4. PEGs
5. Operator Precedence
6. Connecting The Lexer and Parser in Awesome
7. Do It Yourself II
6. Runtime Model
1. Procedural
2. Class-based
3. Prototype-based
4. Functional
5. Our Awesome Runtime
6. Do It Yourself III

7. Interpreter
1. Do It Yourself IV
8. Compilation
1. Using LLVM from Ruby
2. Compiling Awesome to Machine Code
9. Virtual Machine
1. Byte-code
2. Types of VM
3. Prototyping a VM in Ruby
10. Going Further
1. Homoiconicity
2. Self-Hosting
3. What’s Missing?
11. Resources
1. Books & Papers
2. Events
3. Forums and Blogs
4. Interesting Languages
12. Solutions to Do It Yourself
1. Solutions to Do It Yourself I
2. Solutions to Do It Yourself II
3. Solutions to Do It Yourself III
4. Solutions to Do It Yourself IV
13. Appendix: Mio, a minimalist homoiconic language
1. Homoicowhat?
2. Messages all the way down
3. The Runtime
4. Implementing Mio in Mio
5. But it’s ugly
14. Farewell!

Published November 2011.

Cover background image © Asja Boros

Content of this book is © Marc-André Cournoyer. All right reserved. This eBook copy
is for a single user. You may not share it in any way unless you have written permission
of the author.

This is a sample chapter.
Buy the full book online at
createyourproglang.com

PARSER

By themselves, the tokens output by the lexer are just building blocks. The parser
contextualiees them by organieing them in a structure. The lexer produces an array of
tokensj the parser produces a tree of nodes.

Lets take those tokens from previous section:

1 [IDENTIFIER print] [STRING "I ate"] [COMMA]
2 [NUMBER 3] [COMMA]
3 [IDENTIFIER pies]

The most common parser output is an Abstract Syntax Tree, or AST. It’s a tree of
nodes that represents what the code means to the language. The previous lexer
tokens will produce the following:

1 [lCall name=print,
2 argements=[lString valee="I ate"k,
3 lNemher valee=3k,
4 lLocal name=piesk]
5 k]

Or as a visual tree:

Figure 2

The parser found that print was a method call and the following tokens are the
arguments.

Parser generators are commonly used to accomplish the otherwise tedious task of
building a parser. Much like the English language, a programming language needs a
grammar to define its rules. The parser generator will convert this grammar into a parser
that will compile lexer tokens into AST nodes.

BISON (YACC )

Bison is a modern version of Yacc, the most widely used parser. Yacc stands for Yet
Another Compiler Compiler, because it compiles the grammar to a compiler of
tokens. It’s used in several mainstream languages, like Ruby. Most often used with Lex, it
has been ported to several target languages.

Racc for Ruby
Ply for Python
iavaCC for iava

Like Lex, from the previous chapter, Yacc compiles a grammar into a parser. Here’s how
a Yacc grammar rule is defined:

1 Call: /* Name of the rele */
2 Expression '.' IDENTIFIER { yy = CallNodefnew(y1, y3, NULL); }
3 j Expression '.' IDENTIFIER '(' ArgList ')' { yy = CallNodefnew(y1, y3, y5); }
4 /* y1 y2 y3 y4 y5 y6 l= valees from the rele are stored in
5 these variahles. */
6 ;

On the left is defined how the rule can be matched using tokens and other rules.
On the right side, between brackets is the action to execute when the rule matches.

In that block, we can reference tokens being matched using $1, $2, etc. Finally, we store
the result in $$.

LEMON

Lemon is huite similar to Yacc, with a few differences. From its website:

Using a different grammar syntax which is less prone to programming

errors.

The parser generated by Lemon is both re-entrant and thread-safe.

Lemon includes the concept of a non-terminal destructor, which

makes it much easier to write a parser that does not leak memory.

For more information, refer to the the manual or check real examples inside Potion.

ANTLR

ANTLR is another parsing tool. This one let’s you declare lexing and parsing rules in
the same grammar. It has been ported to several target languages.

PEGS

Parsing Expression Grammars, or PEGs, are very powerful at parsing complex
languages. I’ve used a PEG generated from pegkleg in tinyrb to parse Ruby’s
infamous syntax with encouraging results (tinyrb’s grammar).

Treetop is an interesting Ruby tool for creating PEG.

OPERATOR PRECEDENCE

One of the common pitfalls of language parsing is operator precedence. Parsing x
+ y * z should not produce the same result as (x + y) * z, same for all other

operators. Each language has an operator precedence table, often based on
mathematics order of operations. Several ways to handle this exist. Yacc-based
parsers implement the Shunting Yard algorithm in which you give a precedence
level to each kind of operator. Operators are declared in Bison and Yacc with %left
and %right macros. Read more in Bison’s manual.

Here’s the operator precedence table for our language, based on the C language
operator precedence:

1 left '.'
2 right 'n'
3 left '*' '/'
4 left '+' '-'
5 left 'k' 'k=' 'l' 'l='
6 left '==' 'n='
7 left 'vv'
8 left 'jj'
9 right '='
10 left ','

The higher the precedence (top is higher), the sooner the operator will be parsed. If
the line a + b * c is being parsed, the part b * c will be parsed first since *
has higher precedence than +. Now, if several operators having the same
precedence are competing to be parsed all the once, the conflict is resolved using
associativity, declared with the left and right keyword before the token. For
example, with the expression a = b = c. Since = has right-to-left associativity, it
will start parsing from the right, b = c. Resulting in a = (b = c).

For other types of parsers (ANTLR and PEG) a simpler but less efficient alternative
can be used. Simply declaring the grammar rules in the right order will produce the
desired result:

1 expression: exeality
2 exeality: additive ( ( '==' j 'n=' ) additive )*
3 additive: meltiplicative ( ( '+' j '-' ) meltiplicative )*
4 meltiplicative: primary ( ( '*' j '/' ) primary )*
5 primary: '(' expression ')' j NUMBER j zARIABLE j '-' primary

The parser will try to match rules recursively, starting from expression and
finding its way to primary. Since multiplicative is the last rule called in the
parsing process, it will have greater precedence.

CONNECTING THE LEXER AND PARSER IN
AWESOME

For our Awesome parser we’ll use Racc, the Ruby version of Yacc. It’s much harder
to build a parser from scratch than it is to create a lexer. However, most languages
end up writing their own parser because the result is faster and provides better error
reporting.

The input file you supply to Racc contains the grammar of your language and is very
similar to a Yacc grammar.

1 class qarser grammar.y
2

3 g Declare toiens prodeced hy the lexer
4 toien IF ELSE
5 toien DEF
6 toien CLASS
7 toien NEWLINE
8 toien NUMBER
9 toien STRING
10 toien TRUE FALSE NIL
11 toien IDENTIFIER
12 toien CONSTANT
13 toien INDENT DEDENT
14

This is a sample chapter.
Buy the full book online at

createyourproglang.com

How to create a programming language

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