[pppaul]

would recommend looking into writing a grammar, have that generate your AST, then do some transformations on the AST to generate code. you will save a lot of time.

I recently did that for a language that i made, via instaparse. the flexibility and speed i gained was very big. my language isn't Turing complete, but it has functions, lookup tables, and some pattern matching.

[wycliffb]

> would recommend looking into writing a grammar, have that generate your AST, then do some transformations on the AST to generate code. you will save a lot of time.

I had this thought, so I used a parser combinator (mpc) to generate the AST from the grammar and source file, then extract useful elements from the AST for codegen.

[rurban]

With mpc you can support macros, adding better macro definitions at compile-time, not just primitive cpp-style replacements. This would be definitely a game changer.

[wycliffb]

Will definitely follow up on this. Maybe we could support DSLs while at it?

[rurban]

Yes, a bit like perl6 grammars. Just performant.

[lizmat]

And immutable? Aka, you could not create a DSL that would allow you to create other DSL inside of it?