Is there a way to implement custom language features in C#?

Question

I've been puzzling about this for a while and I've looked around a bit, unable to find any discussion about the subject.

Lets assume I wanted to implement a trivial example, like a new looping construct: do..until

Written very similarly to do..while

do {
    //Things happen here
} until (i == 15)

This could be transformed into valid csharp by doing so:

do {
    //Things happen here
} while (!(i == 15))

This is obviously a simple example, but is there any way to add something of this nature? Ideally as a Visual Studio extension to enable syntax highlighting etc.

Answer 1

Microsoft proposes Rolsyn API as an implementation of C# compiler with public API. It contains individual APIs for each of compiler pipeline stages: syntax analysis, symbol creation, binding, MSIL emission. You can provide your own implementation of syntax parser or extend existing one in order to get C# compiler w/ any features you would like.

Roslyn CTP

Let's extend C# language using Roslyn! In my example I'm replacing do-until statement w/ corresponding do-while:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp;

namespace RoslynTest
{

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            var code = @"

            using System;

            class Program {
                public void My() {
                    var i = 5;
                    do {
                        Console.WriteLine(""hello world"");
                        i++;
                    }
                    until (i > 10);
                }
            }
            ";



            //Parsing input code into a SynaxTree object.
            var syntaxTree = SyntaxTree.ParseCompilationUnit(code);

            var syntaxRoot = syntaxTree.GetRoot();

            //Here we will keep all nodes to replace
            var replaceDictionary = new Dictionary<DoStatementSyntax, DoStatementSyntax>();

            //Looking for do-until statements in all descendant nodes
            foreach (var doStatement in syntaxRoot.DescendantNodes().OfType<DoStatementSyntax>())
            {
                //Until token is treated as an identifier by C# compiler. It doesn't know that in our case it is a keyword.
                var untilNode = doStatement.Condition.ChildNodes().OfType<IdentifierNameSyntax>().FirstOrDefault((_node =>
                {
                    return _node.Identifier.ValueText == "until";
                }));

                //Condition is treated as an argument list
                var conditionNode = doStatement.Condition.ChildNodes().OfType<ArgumentListSyntax>().FirstOrDefault();

                if (untilNode != null && conditionNode != null)
                {

                    //Let's replace identifier w/ correct while keyword and condition

                    var whileNode = Syntax.ParseToken("while");

                    var condition = Syntax.ParseExpression("(!" + conditionNode.GetFullText() + ")");

                    var newDoStatement = doStatement.WithWhileKeyword(whileNode).WithCondition(condition);

                    //Accumulating all replacements
                    replaceDictionary.Add(doStatement, newDoStatement);

                }

            }

            syntaxRoot = syntaxRoot.ReplaceNodes(replaceDictionary.Keys, (node1, node2) => replaceDictionary[node1]);

            //Output preprocessed code
            Console.WriteLine(syntaxRoot.GetFullText());

        }
    }
}
///////////
//OUTPUT://
///////////
//            using System;

//            class Program {
//                public void My() {
//                    var i = 5;
//                    do {
//                        Console.WriteLine("hello world");
//                        i++;
//                    }
//while(!(i > 10));
//                }
//            }

Now we can compile updated syntax tree using Roslyn API or save syntaxRoot.GetFullText() to text file and pass it to csc.exe.