Re: Language used to write compilers

Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org> wrote:
>My advice for someone writing a compiler for the first time is to use
>as high level a language as you possibly can. There are plenty of
>languages readily available that are much higher level than Java (and
>obviously vastly more so than C or C++).


The same applies to pretty well any other application, which is not
actually dominated by system interfacing or performance-critical,
low-level code. Many numeric programmers prototype in Matlab, and
Python has a lot going for it as a compiler development language.


Note Python and not Perl. The former has good error checking, and you
will usually be told "nonsense" when you make a simple mistake.
Mistakes in Perl are often other, legal constructs or (worse) illegal
ones that are not detected, with consequences that can be bizarre. In
THIS sense, Python is a much higher level language than Perl.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
[I would argue that perl with the -w option is about as high level,
and I don't find many bugs in my perl code due to one valid thing
being mistyped as another, but we can argue about that separately.
Perl definitely has much larger application libraries than Python,
but unless you want to do something like compile to XML, I can't
think of many that would be particularly useful in a compiler.
-John]

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