Writing a C Compiler (2017)

Okay, so now life is imitating art? Never knew ;-)

No, you are being rude. To the average internet commenter. Or maybe to GPT. ;-)

By bringing down either one of them to the level of the other.

Unless you meant "average" in the same sense as this short tale:

A statistician had his head in a fridge and his feet in an oven, and when asked how he felt, he said, "on the average, I feel quite comfortable".

Your long, detailed, somewhat scholarly, well researched comment, leads us to think (after consulting several prestigious, highly intelligent, real and artificial professors), that you maybe a suitable candidate for the first PhD program at the new international Global PHD Trainers Institute (iGPT Institute). We will shortly be sending you the long, formal and stilted application form, to which you must reply in the same way, but better, as the first test.

All the best.

Digitally signed, Your soon-to-be GPT overlords.

I guess this harkens back to the days when you had to write a compiler in a low-level language because that’s all that the platform that you are targeting supports. Then it sounds weird to talk about writing a compiler in a high-level language in order to target a low-level one, because surely these high-level languages are more platform-dependent than the blessed (guaranteed on the platform) low-level one.

But these days we can access dozens of languages on many platforms. And we can use high-level languages that are good for writing compilers—languages with good string types and algebraic data types—instead of being limited to awfully imperative/procedural ones.

In other words: your perspective sounds way more anachronistic.

Contrarian take: lots of people doing parsing, has, on the whole, highly negative value, and template languages and config files are a prime example of this.

Everybody and their dog thinks it necessary to inflict some new sub-par language on us when in about 99.9% of cases they should just either have stuck to s-expressions or some suitable subset of a popular programming or existing config language with a relatively sane syntax (blaze/bazel did that right, cmake did that very very wrong).

When was the last time you looked at some config file and thought, wow I'm so glad they didn't use toml or python or whatever, but instead made up some completely new syntax nothing in the world apart from this tool itself can parse and that I can't programaticaly manipulate?

When was the last time you thought, wow I am so glad that someone invented a new templating language that creates some new injection vulnerabilities, because no one apart from the lisp people ever seem to have worked out that if you want to interpolate into something tree shaped, you should have a tree-based interpolation syntax? Because although sexps and quasiquote solve this very nicely and concisely everyone else still seems to love string-bashing plus some ad-hoc "escaping" system for this. And one reason for this is of course precisely the enormous abundance of idiotic config languages that can't be easily manipulated as anything than opaque strings.

[Edit: if you do create a new config file language, pretty please provide some means to directly query and losslessly manipulate it; for the lossless part you will either need to have first class comments unambiguously attached to a particular syntactic construct and agreed upon deterministic formatting or IDE-style complexity, the first one is probably a better idea]