| Will help you in a very limited way. Unfortunally, you will need to hunt from several places to go after any half-decent implementation of any decent-enough language. But do anything first. So, take this tutorial and complete it. If after it you wanna move... I'm working in my own language, and after read like hundreds of links/blogs/books/etc, you will find that a lot of that is heavily biased torwards parsing, LISPys, FORTHs, and ultra-heavy-monads-worship or academic complexting that will make your head spin. After all that read, I'm still confused. Because a lot of things are not simpler or obvious in the way how make a blog or a ecommerce site can be. So, read a part of the list I have collected: https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/2ocw2r/how_to_creat... ---- Syntax is very important, but after read a lot, I think that do the parsing stuff is not the very best first step. INSTEAD DO THE AST WALKER. Seriously. Get clear how the the AST can be processed and focus in that. Changes in the AST will cause heavy impacts in your parsing stuff, and a lot of question need to get clarified first. For example, from the link above: My first questions? How make a REPL, a debugger, how implement pattern matching, type checking, if a interpreter can be fast enough, if possible to avoid to do a whole VM for it, etc...
Exist a LOT of practical questions that are left as "a exercise for the reader" that need clarifications.
So, my advice:- Get a list of what do you want for your language. Then think harder and try to remove features and get to the core of it. - From the above, start to understand the details. For example: I wanna to do GO-style concurrency, so... how implement GO-style concurrency? If that is not solved, your syntax is pointless. That is why try to fill the "core" of the language as much as possible before to commit to the GUI (aka:syntax) of it. - Then do a interpreter. Is FAR easier. Even if you wanna do a compiler, start here is more easier. - On the side, play with your syntax, and imagine how write in the language could be. Then start to think "to make this syntax do that, how I can do inside the guts of the compiler"? But you can delay the parser for a while. When the time come for the parsing, probably is better to do as a top-down parser and/or pratt-parser. I don't waste time with parser generators. If your disagree, ok with me ;) I have find that use F# is great for this stuff. However, OCalm have more code-samples (ie: ML languages are made for this!). Lisp will work great if your are insane to like that ;). Hardcode C-developer? Tons of code to look, but not very much in clarity to see. |
Interpreter is unavoidably convoluted, it is full of very complex things like environment handling, it cannot be split into smaller parts in any sane way.
Compiler, on the other hand, is nothing but a trivial sequence of very simple tranforms (as simple as you like), each is nothing but a couple of term rewriting rules. You do not need a Turing-complete language to implement a compiler.