January 2013
Intermediate to advanced
328 pages
8h 5m
English
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Parsing Cymbol
To demonstrate how to parse a programming language with syntax derived from C, we’re going to build a grammar for a language I conjured up called Cymbol. Cymbol is a simple non-object-oriented programming language that looks like C without structs. A grammar for this language serves as a good prototype for other new programming languages, if you’d like to build one. We won’t see any new ANTLR syntax, but our grammar will demonstrate how to build a simple left-recursive expression rule.
When designing a language, there’s no formal grammar or language reference manual to work from. Instead, we start by conjuring up representative samples of the language. From there, we derive a grammar as we did in Deriving Grammars from Language ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.