How To Make A Programming Language
Ever wanted to create your own programming language?
Table Of Contents
- Index
- ANTLR4 Setup <- You are here.
- ANTLR4 Grammar
- Creating Toylet
- Project Setup
- LLVM Crashcourse
- Compiling Toylet
- Epilogue
Basic Setup
Please don’t use the default packages from package managers! First thing you need to do is download here. You want to download the jar linked under “ANTLR tool and Java Target”. You also need to have Java installed. I recommend copying it to a safe location, which I recommend /usr/local/lib for Linux. You run this command as java -jar JAR_FILE_PATH, which I will shorthand as antlr4 for the rest of the tutorial. To get this shortcut to be antlr4 on linux, edit ~/.bashrc, put in the line alias antlr4='java -jar /usr/local/lib/antlr-4.9.2-complete.jar' where the path is to your jar file, which may be different from mine. Do source ~/.bashrc to refresh, and antlr4 should be a recognized command! For Windows, you have to append the path to the jar file to the CLASSPATH environment variable, or create it if it does not exist.
Testing Environment Setup
You need the classpath environment variable to be appended with a value. For Linux, edit your ~/.bashrc to have this line: export CLASSPATH=".:/usr/local/lib/antlr-4.9.2-complete.jar:$CLASSPATH" where the path to the jar is where yours is. Also put in this line alias grun='java org.antlr.v4.gui.TestRig' so that way we can test data easily. java org.antlr.v4.gui.TestRig is how we will test our grammar, and I will refer to this command as grun from now on. If you are on Windows, you probably have to edit your environment variables manually for the CLASSPATH variable. You can use doskey instead of alias. You can also use the full command abbreviated by them. Do source ~/.bashrc to refresh.
Does It Work?
If you can run antlr4 or java -jar /usr/local/lib/antlr-4.9.2-complete.jar where the jar is the path to your jar file, you got ANTLR set up! If you can do grun or java org.antlr.v4.gui.TestRig, you can test your grammars too!
Next
Next thing to do is learn ANTLR4 syntax! ANTLR4 Grammar