Skip to main content

Book Review : How To Create Pragmatic, Lightweight Languages


At last, a guide that makes creating a language with its associated baggage of lexers, parsers and compilers, accessible to mere mortals, rather to a group of a few hardcore eclectics as it stood until now.

The first thing that catches the eye, is the subtitle:

The unix philosophy applied to language design, for GPLs and DSLs"

What is meant by "unix philosophy" ?. It's taking simple, high quality components and combining them together in smart ways to obtain a complex result; the exact approach the book adopts.
I'm getting ahead here, but a first sample of this philosophy becomes apparent at the beginnings of Chapter 5 where the Parser treats and calls the Lexer like  unix's pipes as in lexer|parser. Until the end of the book, this pipeline is going to become larger, like a chain, due to the amount of components that end up interacting together.

The book opens by putting things into perspective in Chapter 1: Motivation: why do you want to build language tools?
There are two different scenarios in which you may want to do that:
1. you want to create a new language: maybe a general purpose language (GPL), maybe a domain specific language (DSL). In any case you may want to build some support for this language of yours. Maybe you want to generate C and compile the generated code, maybe you want to interpret it. Maybe you want to build a compiler or a simulator for your language. Or you want to do all of this stuff and more.

2. you want to create an additional tool for an existing language. Do you want to perform static analysis on your Java code? Or build a translator from Python to JavaScript? Maybe a web editor for some less known language?

Nowadays, we are surrounded by those: languages targeting a common runtime like .NET or JVM; language A to language B transpilers, the likes of Perlito in translating Perl5/6 to JavaScript; or dedicated DSL's within larger frameworks such as the Perl Dancer Web Framework's one which makes implementing a web application trivial.

full review on i-programmer.info
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Machine Learning Applied to Game of Thrones

No-one wants the beloved series to end. Some, like the geeks at Pachyderm, have gone to great lengths to extend its life span, to the point of employing ML to serve the Iron Throne.  This is a new example of style transfer where ML identifies the essential characteristics of a genre in order to create its own examples, such as we've seen before with art  and even with cooking. But first of all, what is Pachyderm and where does that word come from?
full article on i-programmer
Post a Comment
Read more

SAP's Creating Trustworthy and Ethical Artificial Intelligence

With the ink hardly dry on the pages of the EU Ethical AI Guidelines manifest, a free online course exploring the issues they raise is already in prospect on the openSAP platform. Run by members of the very same group, the European Union’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, who wrote the guidelines and in cooperation with SAP's online education platform, a course with the titleCreating Trustworthy and Ethical Artificial Intelligence has been made accessible to anyone with an interest on AI or ML:
full article on i-programmer.info
Post a Comment
Read more