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-<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
- "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
-
-<html>
-<head>
- <title>Kaleidoscope: Tutorial Introduction and the Lexer</title>
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
- <meta name="author" content="Chris Lattner">
- <link rel="stylesheet" href="../_static/llvm.css" type="text/css">
-</head>
-
-<body>
-
-<h1>Kaleidoscope: Tutorial Introduction and the Lexer</h1>
-
-<ul>
-<li><a href="index.html">Up to Tutorial Index</a></li>
-<li>Chapter 1
- <ol>
- <li><a href="#intro">Tutorial Introduction</a></li>
- <li><a href="#language">The Basic Language</a></li>
- <li><a href="#lexer">The Lexer</a></li>
- </ol>
-</li>
-<li><a href="LangImpl2.html">Chapter 2</a>: Implementing a Parser and AST</li>
-</ul>
-
-<div class="doc_author">
- <p>Written by <a href="mailto:sabre@nondot.org">Chris Lattner</a></p>
-</div>
-
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-<h2><a name="intro">Tutorial Introduction</a></h2>
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-
-<div>
-
-<p>Welcome to the "Implementing a language with LLVM" tutorial. This tutorial
-runs through the implementation of a simple language, showing how fun and
-easy it can be. This tutorial will get you up and started as well as help to
-build a framework you can extend to other languages. The code in this tutorial
-can also be used as a playground to hack on other LLVM specific things.
-</p>
-
-<p>
-The goal of this tutorial is to progressively unveil our language, describing
-how it is built up over time. This will let us cover a fairly broad range of
-language design and LLVM-specific usage issues, showing and explaining the code
-for it all along the way, without overwhelming you with tons of details up
-front.</p>
-
-<p>It is useful to point out ahead of time that this tutorial is really about
-teaching compiler techniques and LLVM specifically, <em>not</em> about teaching
-modern and sane software engineering principles. In practice, this means that
-we'll take a number of shortcuts to simplify the exposition. For example, the
-code leaks memory, uses global variables all over the place, doesn't use nice
-design patterns like <a
-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern">visitors</a>, etc... but it
-is very simple. If you dig in and use the code as a basis for future projects,
-fixing these deficiencies shouldn't be hard.</p>
-
-<p>I've tried to put this tutorial together in a way that makes chapters easy to
-skip over if you are already familiar with or are uninterested in the various
-pieces. The structure of the tutorial is:
-</p>
-
-<ul>
-<li><b><a href="#language">Chapter #1</a>: Introduction to the Kaleidoscope
-language, and the definition of its Lexer</b> - This shows where we are going
-and the basic functionality that we want it to do. In order to make this
-tutorial maximally understandable and hackable, we choose to implement
-everything in C++ instead of using lexer and parser generators. LLVM obviously
-works just fine with such tools, feel free to use one if you prefer.</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl2.html">Chapter #2</a>: Implementing a Parser and
-AST</b> - With the lexer in place, we can talk about parsing techniques and
-basic AST construction. This tutorial describes recursive descent parsing and
-operator precedence parsing. Nothing in Chapters 1 or 2 is LLVM-specific,
-the code doesn't even link in LLVM at this point. :)</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl3.html">Chapter #3</a>: Code generation to LLVM IR</b> -
-With the AST ready, we can show off how easy generation of LLVM IR really
-is.</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl4.html">Chapter #4</a>: Adding JIT and Optimizer
-Support</b> - Because a lot of people are interested in using LLVM as a JIT,
-we'll dive right into it and show you the 3 lines it takes to add JIT support.
-LLVM is also useful in many other ways, but this is one simple and "sexy" way
-to shows off its power. :)</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl5.html">Chapter #5</a>: Extending the Language: Control
-Flow</b> - With the language up and running, we show how to extend it with
-control flow operations (if/then/else and a 'for' loop). This gives us a chance
-to talk about simple SSA construction and control flow.</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl6.html">Chapter #6</a>: Extending the Language:
-User-defined Operators</b> - This is a silly but fun chapter that talks about
-extending the language to let the user program define their own arbitrary
-unary and binary operators (with assignable precedence!). This lets us build a
-significant piece of the "language" as library routines.</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl7.html">Chapter #7</a>: Extending the Language: Mutable
-Variables</b> - This chapter talks about adding user-defined local variables
-along with an assignment operator. The interesting part about this is how
-easy and trivial it is to construct SSA form in LLVM: no, LLVM does <em>not</em>
-require your front-end to construct SSA form!</li>
-<li><b><a href="LangImpl8.html">Chapter #8</a>: Conclusion and other useful LLVM
-tidbits</b> - This chapter wraps up the series by talking about potential
-ways to extend the language, but also includes a bunch of pointers to info about
-"special topics" like adding garbage collection support, exceptions, debugging,
-support for "spaghetti stacks", and a bunch of other tips and tricks.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-<p>By the end of the tutorial, we'll have written a bit less than 700 lines of
-non-comment, non-blank, lines of code. With this small amount of code, we'll
-have built up a very reasonable compiler for a non-trivial language including
-a hand-written lexer, parser, AST, as well as code generation support with a JIT
-compiler. While other systems may have interesting "hello world" tutorials,
-I think the breadth of this tutorial is a great testament to the strengths of
-LLVM and why you should consider it if you're interested in language or compiler
-design.</p>
-
-<p>A note about this tutorial: we expect you to extend the language and play
-with it on your own. Take the code and go crazy hacking away at it, compilers
-don't need to be scary creatures - it can be a lot of fun to play with
-languages!</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-<h2><a name="language">The Basic Language</a></h2>
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-
-<div>
-
-<p>This tutorial will be illustrated with a toy language that we'll call
-"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope">Kaleidoscope</a>" (derived
-from "meaning beautiful, form, and view").
-Kaleidoscope is a procedural language that allows you to define functions, use
-conditionals, math, etc. Over the course of the tutorial, we'll extend
-Kaleidoscope to support the if/then/else construct, a for loop, user defined
-operators, JIT compilation with a simple command line interface, etc.</p>
-
-<p>Because we want to keep things simple, the only datatype in Kaleidoscope is a
-64-bit floating point type (aka 'double' in C parlance). As such, all values
-are implicitly double precision and the language doesn't require type
-declarations. This gives the language a very nice and simple syntax. For
-example, the following simple example computes <a
-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number">Fibonacci numbers:</a></p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
-# Compute the x'th fibonacci number.
-def fib(x)
- if x &lt; 3 then
- 1
- else
- fib(x-1)+fib(x-2)
-
-# This expression will compute the 40th number.
-fib(40)
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>We also allow Kaleidoscope to call into standard library functions (the LLVM
-JIT makes this completely trivial). This means that you can use the 'extern'
-keyword to define a function before you use it (this is also useful for mutually
-recursive functions). For example:</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
-extern sin(arg);
-extern cos(arg);
-extern atan2(arg1 arg2);
-
-atan2(sin(.4), cos(42))
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>A more interesting example is included in Chapter 6 where we write a little
-Kaleidoscope application that <a href="LangImpl6.html#example">displays
-a Mandelbrot Set</a> at various levels of magnification.</p>
-
-<p>Lets dive into the implementation of this language!</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-<h2><a name="lexer">The Lexer</a></h2>
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
-
-<div>
-
-<p>When it comes to implementing a language, the first thing needed is
-the ability to process a text file and recognize what it says. The traditional
-way to do this is to use a "<a
-href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis">lexer</a>" (aka 'scanner')
-to break the input up into "tokens". Each token returned by the lexer includes
-a token code and potentially some metadata (e.g. the numeric value of a number).
-First, we define the possibilities:
-</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
-// The lexer returns tokens [0-255] if it is an unknown character, otherwise one
-// of these for known things.
-enum Token {
- tok_eof = -1,
-
- // commands
- tok_def = -2, tok_extern = -3,
-
- // primary
- tok_identifier = -4, tok_number = -5,
-};
-
-static std::string IdentifierStr; // Filled in if tok_identifier
-static double NumVal; // Filled in if tok_number
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>Each token returned by our lexer will either be one of the Token enum values
-or it will be an 'unknown' character like '+', which is returned as its ASCII
-value. If the current token is an identifier, the <tt>IdentifierStr</tt>
-global variable holds the name of the identifier. If the current token is a
-numeric literal (like 1.0), <tt>NumVal</tt> holds its value. Note that we use
-global variables for simplicity, this is not the best choice for a real language
-implementation :).
-</p>
-
-<p>The actual implementation of the lexer is a single function named
-<tt>gettok</tt>. The <tt>gettok</tt> function is called to return the next token
-from standard input. Its definition starts as:</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
-/// gettok - Return the next token from standard input.
-static int gettok() {
- static int LastChar = ' ';
-
- // Skip any whitespace.
- while (isspace(LastChar))
- LastChar = getchar();
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>
-<tt>gettok</tt> works by calling the C <tt>getchar()</tt> function to read
-characters one at a time from standard input. It eats them as it recognizes
-them and stores the last character read, but not processed, in LastChar. The
-first thing that it has to do is ignore whitespace between tokens. This is
-accomplished with the loop above.</p>
-
-<p>The next thing <tt>gettok</tt> needs to do is recognize identifiers and
-specific keywords like "def". Kaleidoscope does this with this simple loop:</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
- if (isalpha(LastChar)) { // identifier: [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*
- IdentifierStr = LastChar;
- while (isalnum((LastChar = getchar())))
- IdentifierStr += LastChar;
-
- if (IdentifierStr == "def") return tok_def;
- if (IdentifierStr == "extern") return tok_extern;
- return tok_identifier;
- }
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>Note that this code sets the '<tt>IdentifierStr</tt>' global whenever it
-lexes an identifier. Also, since language keywords are matched by the same
-loop, we handle them here inline. Numeric values are similar:</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
- if (isdigit(LastChar) || LastChar == '.') { // Number: [0-9.]+
- std::string NumStr;
- do {
- NumStr += LastChar;
- LastChar = getchar();
- } while (isdigit(LastChar) || LastChar == '.');
-
- NumVal = strtod(NumStr.c_str(), 0);
- return tok_number;
- }
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>This is all pretty straight-forward code for processing input. When reading
-a numeric value from input, we use the C <tt>strtod</tt> function to convert it
-to a numeric value that we store in <tt>NumVal</tt>. Note that this isn't doing
-sufficient error checking: it will incorrectly read "1.23.45.67" and handle it as
-if you typed in "1.23". Feel free to extend it :). Next we handle comments:
-</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
- if (LastChar == '#') {
- // Comment until end of line.
- do LastChar = getchar();
- while (LastChar != EOF &amp;&amp; LastChar != '\n' &amp;&amp; LastChar != '\r');
-
- if (LastChar != EOF)
- return gettok();
- }
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>We handle comments by skipping to the end of the line and then return the
-next token. Finally, if the input doesn't match one of the above cases, it is
-either an operator character like '+' or the end of the file. These are handled
-with this code:</p>
-
-<div class="doc_code">
-<pre>
- // Check for end of file. Don't eat the EOF.
- if (LastChar == EOF)
- return tok_eof;
-
- // Otherwise, just return the character as its ascii value.
- int ThisChar = LastChar;
- LastChar = getchar();
- return ThisChar;
-}
-</pre>
-</div>
-
-<p>With this, we have the complete lexer for the basic Kaleidoscope language
-(the <a href="LangImpl2.html#code">full code listing</a> for the Lexer is
-available in the <a href="LangImpl2.html">next chapter</a> of the tutorial).
-Next we'll <a href="LangImpl2.html">build a simple parser that uses this to
-build an Abstract Syntax Tree</a>. When we have that, we'll include a driver
-so that you can use the lexer and parser together.
-</p>
-
-<a href="LangImpl2.html">Next: Implementing a Parser and AST</a>
-</div>
-
-<!-- *********************************************************************** -->
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