Choosing a parser for Mathematica input

I'd like to write a program that uses a Mathematica-like syntax. Not a
100% clone, but as close to Mathematica input as reasonably practical.
Can anyone suggest a suitable front end parser? I was thinking of
using LLVM for the back end.


Here's a description of the syntax


http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Syntax.html
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/TheSyntaxOfTheMathematicaLanguage.html


Things to note in particular is that whitespace can often mean
multiplication. i.e.


In[1]:= 12.1 2


Out[1]= 24.2


Mathematica supports many programming styles - procedule, functional
and rule-based programming


A Lisp to Mathematica translator was written by Prof Fateman


http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.51.4310&rep=rep1&type=pdf


In the paper Fateman says the language appears to be ad-hoc, so he had
limited success with a common parser and used a hand-written one. But
I'm not entirely convinced of his objectivity - he tends to mock the
creators of Mathematica - his program is called MockMMA. He was one of
the creators of a computer algebra system Maxima, which he always
compares favorably to Mathematica, though few others do,


I've never written a compiler, beyond noddy calculators in
introductory books, so I suspect this language is not an ideal one to
learn with. But I'd be interested in what, if any tools would be
capable of handling such a complex language,


Dave

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