Doing a compiler

        Hi everyone.
        After two years of playing around with compilers, doing grammars,
  mini-interpreters and learning a lot of stuff that only practice shows,
        I've decided to do a rather ambicious project.
        I want to do a Turbo Pascal/Delphi compiler and since I'll do it as
  an hobby, I hasn't a deadline :-).
        I know that there are several free Pascal compilers lying around, such
  as p2c and gpc, however I want to do it either way.
        But I am facing a dilemma :


        - Should the compiler be done in a subset of Pascal (TP 5.0) that is
          suported by p2c, so that it can be easily ported to other platforms ?


        - Or should it be done in a language like C or C++ with yacc/lex ?


        I think that the first one is the best because I remember that someone
  in this newsgroup a few months ago (C vs C++ in compiler books) has said
  that a compiler for a general programming language should be built using
  that same language. The second one is also appealing because it implies
  a smaller development cycle.
        I hope when the compiler reachs the phase of code generation, I could
  play around with optimization techniques and that poses a problem if I
  choose C++, because I think that I shouldn't try to convert the
  procedural algorithms described in the books to OO because in that way
  I'll loose focus of the problem.


        I would like to receive comments to this post.


        Bye and thanks to everyone.
--
| Paulo Pinto, pjmlp@students.si.fct.unl.pt |
[My main advice is to start with a small project or you'll never get to
a point where anything works. -John]
--

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