Implementing General Programming Languages

[Vijitha Kumara]

Hi Terence,

What are the things included in explaining about creating General Programming Languages in the book?

Thanks,

[Burk Hufnagel]

Vijitha,
Good question, we've been focusing on DSLs for most of the week. I'd forgotten the title even mentioned General Programming Languages. Did you look at the table of contents? I posted a link to the full one in another thread and it got copied into the Welcome-Terence-Parr thread at the top of the forum.

Burk

[Terence Parr]

Vijitha Kumara wrote:What are the things included in explaining about creating General Programming Languages in the book?

Implementing DSLs and general-purpose programming languages have a huge amount, hence, it makes a lot of sense to deal with them together in the implementation patterns book. The difference lies largely in degree. For example, in a simple scripting language, you might only have one scope of variables whereas in Java you have all sorts of nested scopes. The book identifies the various symbol table patterns common to most programming languages and scripting languages. Either you have a single monolithic scope, nested scopes like C, data aggregate scopes like C structs, and finally class hierarchies and object-oriented languages like C++. I think of configuration files such as property files as being scripts. There is a single global scope in which we put all the properties.

[Burk Hufnagel]

Terence Parr wrote:Implementing DSLs and general-purpose programming languages have a huge amount, hence, it makes a lot of sense to deal with them together in the implementation patterns book.

Terrence,

I'm guessing you meant to say that DSLs and GPLs have a huge amount of overlap.

Burk