How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
lisperator.net
How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#2So this is how magic happens
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#3Just wondering if it is true that most of the modern language parsers are written in C?
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#4Just wondering if it is true that most of the modern language parsers are written in C?
Probably true, but only because the implementation language for them is also C. Some of them also frequently use a mix of the implementation language and grammar specification DSL like yacc.
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#5Is there such a thing as a language that compiles to a value rather than an executable program?
I've done a really hacky version of something this where a user would input a succinct, high-level description of a sequence of colored lighting, and my program would parse* that and build the tedious, low-level JSON representation of that sequence for yet another program to perform. Is there a fancy or unfancy name for that?
*Ok really it was a little bit of munging and then eval.
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#6The dude writes good code. He's the author of Uglify.
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#7Is there such a thing as a language that compiles to a value rather than an executable program? I've done a really hacky version of something this where a user would input a succinct, high-level description of a sequence of colored lighting, and my program would parse* that and build the tedious, low-level JSON representation of that sequence for yet another program to perform. Is there a fancy or unfancy name for th…
Well, at some level every language compiles to a value rather than an executable program - the parse tree of a source module is a data structure describing the program, and the executable is a sequence of bytes that is interpreted by the processor.
There's a continuum between this and what we think of as a "value" in programming terms (eg. an int or a string), but the boundary is fuzzy. It was pretty common at Google to write DSLs that compiled to a protobuf that'd be loaded into the server as configuration, for example. CUDA compiles programs into a buffer that is then sent to the GPU. HTML compiles into the DOM, which is a value that can be manipulated with Javascript.
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#8Just wondering if it is true that most of the modern language parsers are written in C?
Probably true, but only because the implementation language for them is also C . Some of them also frequently use a mix of the implementation language and grammar specification DSL like yacc.
Use of DSLs and tools like flex and bison makes the implementation a whole lot more reliable (but only if they're used, and some commonly run languages have a very implementation-specific grammar).
consider:
input: /* empty string */
| input line
;
line: '\n'
| exp '\n' { printf ("\t%.10g\n", $1); }
;
exp: NUM { $$ = $1; }
| exp '+' exp { $$ = $1 + $3; }
| exp '-' exp { $$ = $1 - $3; }
| exp '*' exp { $$ = $1 * $3; }
| exp '/' exp { $$ = $1 / $3; }
| '-' exp %prec NEG { $$ = -$2; }
| exp '^' exp { $$ = pow ($1, $3); }
| '(' exp ')' { $$ = $2; }
;
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#9Just wondering if it is true that most of the modern language parsers are written in C?
Go is now written in Go
Re: How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
#10Immediately thought about another awesome resource about how to write a language in JavaScript: