Tutorials/How to program your own programming language

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OK, although PHP already exists, we want to program our own programming language. This is an example for it, we call our programming language stark. This article describes all about it.

Contents

Ideas

One idea of stark is that you can find every function definition very easy. For example, to find the definition of foo, search for "def foo".

Syntax

The following syntax shall be possible with our programming language: 
write ("hello world");
a:=42;
b:=a;
def function1()
{
  global b;
  b:=b-1;
  if (b>40) function1();
}
function1();

Implement it

Ok, first, we need a lexical analyzer. This will tell us what is a token (e.g. a command or the = sign), what a string literal and so on. This will be used by a compiler compiler to assign its parameters to every token (e.g. the command "print" can be followed by a number or by a string literal. This compiler compiler will build a command tree out of the source code, e.g. the above code will get: 
  
  type=command
  name=write
 
    type=string
    content="hello world"
  
  type=assignment
  assignee=a
  value=42

  type=assignment
  assignee=b
  
    type=compute
    content=a

  type=function definition
  name=function1
  
    type=global 
    name=b
  
    type=assignment
    assignee=b
    
      type=compute
      content=b-1
    
    type=if (requires three tokens, lvalue, rvalue and what-if-true)
    operator="<"
    
      type=compute
      content=b
    
      type=compute
      content=40
    
      type=functioncall
      content=function1

Your lessons

See also

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