Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter

Simon Chapman (simon@magnorth.nildram.co.uk) wrote:
    : All I really want to do is create an interpreter for my simple
  : scripting language. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I
  : should start? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.


A Johnstone wrote:
> Has anyone else noticed that everytime somebody asks a question like
> this they get a load of responses saying - don't write another
> language, use TCL (or something else). It comes to something when the
> comp.compilers community is telling people not to write language
> translators... ;-)


It's not that the comp.compilers community is opposed to developing
more/newer languages, it's just that (as opposed to 5 years ago) there
are quite a few freely available plug-in languages, languages which
were designed to be used as control languages for other environments.
Python and TCL are probably the best candidates, but there are at
least a half dozen other languages which can be easily adapted. Given
that these tools exist, and that they solve 90% of the problems that
generally encourage people to write languages, why not use them and
save the effort for the hard stuff?


Of course, it could be that we're just tired of learning
yet-another-extension-language. During my career I've learned over 60
distinct programming languages, most of which I've used for one
specific task, for a relatively short period of time. I'm really not
that interested in having someone foist another write-only language on
me ... I guess I must be getting old.


- Craig -
--
W. Craig Trader, Senior Internet Engineer <ct7@mitre.org>
--

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