Re: Contemplating writing first compiler... comments please.

Hello Martin,


I think code generation will be a major problem in your project
because of all those little details you need to care about in order to
produce really executable .exe files. My suggestion is to generate a
symbolic intermediate code instead, and then have an interpreter
executing that code. Advantages are that it is much easies to generate
such a code, its easier to check its correctness and last not least
this approach is also used professionally: the UCSD Pascal, Modula-2
and Fortran implementations used this approach, and that idea has
recently been recycled for the implementation of Java (here in order
to get hardware- independent machine code).


For an idea of how such a code might look like, take a look into
"compiler construction" by Niklaus Wirth (by the way, I think that
those editions of that book which used Modula-2 as implementation
language are better then the current edition - my personal opinion
only...).


Hope that helps,


    Wolfgang Gellerich
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