Programming Languages

tags : Parsers

Thus a language definition implies a model of the machine on which programs in the language will run. If a real machine conforms well to the model, then an implementation on that machine is likely to be efficient and easily written; if not, the implementation will be painful to provide and costly to use.

Via “Portability of C Programs and the Unix System”, S.C. Johnson and D.M. Ritchie

How they are made? §

• C, FORTRAN, Java, Pascal, Lisp, Forth, Ada, Python, Ruby, Go, etc.: none of these languages are context-sensitive. None are context-free either. Programming languages are complicated
• Modern languages typically are defined in multiple levels
  • L1: Defining the lexical structure, using something like Regular Expressions
  • L2: Defining Context Free Grammar (CFG) or close to it
  • L3: Uses arbitrary code to finish the parse.
• This has proven to be a robust way to design languages which both humans and compilers understand.

Lex/Flex vs Yacc/Bison §

• These are old tools, but basically Lex and Yacc “were” not free. While their alternatives Flex and Bison are.

Lexing §

• Flex is a lexer generator
• Lexing : Turning a stream of characters into a stream of abstract tokens
• It lets you provide a Regex for each type of token in your language, and it will write a lexer for you

Parsing §

• Bison is a parser generator. It takes a list of productions and writes a parser for you.
• Parsing: Collecting tokens into their productions
• Lets you specify a grammar that groups tokens together into various logical pieces. Eg. Order of operations, groups statements properly as intended by the programmer.
• Usually that grammar is given in something like BNF

LLVM §

See LLVM

Grammar? §

• See Chomsky Hierarchy
• For reading in the user input we need to write a grammar which describes the language.
  • Use the grammar to validate user input.
  • Use the grammar to build a structured internal representation(understand, evaluate, compute etc)

Paradigms §

Difference between function and a procedure

Both functions and procedures are subroutines used to re-executing a predefined block of code.

• Functions
  • Functions return a value
  • Designed to have minimal side effects
  • Usually concerned with higher level ideas and concepts.’
• Procedure
  • Do not return a value
  • Primary purpose is to accomplish a given task and cause a desired side effect.

Declarative §

• A Function
• Expressions. Usually no statements or commands.
• “what to do, not how to do it.”
• Functional Programming is a subset of declarative programming
• Declarative programming is to program on a higher level of abstraction than imperative programming. Neither is better or worse, but both have their places.

Imperative §

• Statements and Commands
• A procedure. Causes side effects, mutates state.
• How to do it, not what to do
• Procedural programming is a subset of imperative programming.

Terms §

• Statically Typed: Detects type errors at compile time; if a type error is detected, the language won’t allow execution of the program.
• Type Safety: A type-safe language limits which kinds of operations can be performed on which kinds of data.
  • Some languages, like Python and Racket, are type-safe but dynamically typed. That is, type errors are caught only at run time. Other languages, like C and C++, are statically typed but not type safe: they check for some type errors, but don’t guarantee the absence of all type errors. That is, there’s no guarantee that a type error won’t occur at run time. And still other languages, like Java, use a combination of static and dynamic typing to achieve type safety.

Links §

• One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• Where does software innovation happen? A zoomable map