Learning to Design Novel Programming Languages using CodeBlock Syntax Checker

In a programmer’s pursuit of using or creating new programming languages, finding errors in the syntax of code can present many issues. Languages with little to no documentation and incomprehensible exception handling and reports are frustrating to work with and can create confusion when trying to locate where in the code the program has faulted. In this paper we present CodeBlock, a parser generator and syntax checker for arbitrary programming languages. CodeBlock is a block based grammar builder for any programming language that constructs a parsing expression grammar for the language based on user built expressions. This grammar can then be used within the CodeBlock website or in the CodeBlock Node.JS application to test the syntax of either written code, or files containing code in the language, reporting comprehensible error messages if errors in syntax are found. Our eventual goal is to incorporate CodeBlock into a compiler design tutoring system, called CompiTS, in which it will play a central role in teaching students how to design new programming languages and test the effectiveness of the new language using rapid prototyping and a translational approach to implementation. This is an emerging research, and in this paper, we only focus on the syntax checking component of the CompiTS system.