Build Your Own Programming Language

Chapter 15: Domain Control Structures

The code generation that was presented in the previous chapters covered basic conditional and loop control structures, but domain-specific languages often have unique or customized semantics that merit introducing novel control structures. Adding a new control structure is usually substantially more difficult than adding a new function or operator. However, when they are effective, the addition of domain control structures is a large part of what makes domain-specific languages worth developing instead of just writing class libraries.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

• Knowing when you need a new control structure
• Processing text using string scanning
• Rendering graphics regions

The first section ...