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Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?

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Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?

#1

Post by da_murvel »

I've been thinking about writing my own programming language for some time. This to gain a deeper understanding of how programming languages, and by extent, computers work. I've bought the Flex and Bison book by John Levine to have a resource on parsing and lexing. I have come to realize however, that writing a complete language like Java, Python, Ruby, from bottom to the top, is of course not a small task. So therefore I started to think of writing maybe a compiler for another language, writing a "simple" language like SQL, Markdown etc. to begin with.

What are your experiences when writing a new programming language, where and how did you start?

Re: Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?

#2

Post by CyberFonic »

I would suggest looking at Niklaus Wirth's Compiler Construction book and even the Oberon compiler. This is one of the best ways to learn about compilers and writing programming languages. See: https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/

Another approach is to look at SICP, it is Scheme oriented and more oriented towards macros. See: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html

SQL is a deceptively complex language, the optimisations that it performs are very complex. Markdown, on the other hand, is more of a transpiler to HTML and is not Turing Complete.

Re: Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?

#8

Post by iafisher »

Build Your Own Lisp (http://buildyourownlisp.com/) is as good a starting point as any. You learn to implement a high-level dynamic programming language in C, which is a common choice of implementation language for interpreters (e.g., CPython, Ruby). I really can't recommend the book enough.

Re: Ask HN: What's a starting point for learning how to write programming languages?

#10

Post by axlprose »

Beautiful Racket[0] is a good starting point that covers a lot of nice small examples that incrementally build up your understanding of the different components involved in making languages. And it uses Racket[1], which incorporates the idea of crafting many small "domain-specific" languages to solve different problems into its entire philosophy[2].

[0] https://beautifulracket.com/

[1] https://racket-lang.org/

[2] http://felleisen.org/matthias/manifesto/

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