[musya]

Okay we hear about programming languages being made and so forth, but my qestion is this, how do you make a programming language? what would one do to start his own programming language?

[no2pencil]

musya, on 26 Feb, 2009 - 09:19 PM, said:

what would one do to start his own programming language?

1st, you would have to have a need, a requirement that another language just simply couldn't fill.

& if you knew why you needed to make a new one, you'd probably know enough about what you're doing to know how to make one

The reality of it is, you need to know the ins & outs of memory usage, cpu usage, & all of the low level i/o of the PC.

An interpreted language, such as brainfuck might be simpler to create.

** Edit **

I'm not saying that's a simple language, it's just the 1st interpreted language that came to mind.

[musya]

So its not such a thing that you can build it from say c++? would you need to go down to assembly? or c? I'm just kinda lost as to how you would give birth to a language for example such as php?

[no2pencil]

I wouldn't say that it can't be done in C/C++, but surely you would need to have an understanding of assembler & hardware usage as well.

As per the wiki, PHP was written in C.

[ayman_mastermind]

I stumbled upon this tutorial that shows how to make your own scripting language under linux, actually C and C++ play a major role in it, http://ubuntuforums....ad.php?t=351973 hope this helps, good luck

[Sadaiy]

programming languages are simply an abstraction of the von neumann mahcine.. I recommend you create your language from assembly.

[timothybrown]

If you are going to create a language, you'll need a lot of knowledge, time, and effort. I've never attempted to do this myself but I heard about some kind of tool, the YACC Parser or something like that helps. I really don't know, I'm a noob when it comes to creating new languages.

However I was really bored one day and I didn't want to write a lick of code so I just opened up Notepad and wrote documentation for a non-existent language... it had syntax similar to C++ and Java, and it looked really cool - but no plans to ever code it.

[Kiriran]

musya, on 26 Feb, 2009 - 07:19 PM, said:

[...] what would one do to start his own programming language?

well you need some background in parsing and code generation. A nice book to start with is "Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice" by Kenneth C. Louden.
And I wouldn't implement the language in assembler. Use whatever language you are comfortable with. At the moment, I'm writing a Scheme interpreter in javascript For the first (few) languages, I'd write everything yourself. There are tools (lex/yacc, ANTLR ...) that can generate most of what you need for the lexical analysis and parsing, but there's a lot you learn by doing it by hand. Create diffrent parsers => LL(1), LR(1), LALR(1), SLR(1) and the (k) versions. Also semantic analysis is an important topic and for finishing touches optimize the code (pre calculate results, unroll loops and stuff like that). Then generate the code for your target plattform (CLR, JVM, Parrot, native, your own (bytecode) interpreter)

Good luck

[yohoe1101]

Kiriran, on 20 Apr, 2009 - 12:34 PM, said:

well you need some background in parsing and code generation. A nice book to start with is "Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice" by Kenneth C. Louden.

Is the the famed "Dragon Book" ?

I've started reading up on VS2008 DSL features (just started).

I'm interested in possible new classes of programming languages that incorporate something innovative, for instance, how about an "embrionic language" that is sort of like the HAL 9000 when it first boots up and requires a knowledgable programmer to proram it, but remembers everything along the way, collecting statistical data about the cognative approach of its users.

Aaron

[333OnlyHalfEvil]

ayman_mastermind, on 28 Feb, 2009 - 10:52 AM, said:

I stumbled upon this tutorial that shows how to make your own scripting language under linux, actually C and C++ play a major role in it, http://ubuntuforums....ad.php?t=351973 hope this helps, good luck

scripting languages and programming languages are different.

[SixOfEleven]

To create a new language you first have to develop the grammar for the language, meaning the syntax. Like in C++ you have:

while (i < 30)
{
	statements...
}

That is an example of the grammar of a language.

Once you have the grammar you need to write a parser. The parser goes over what the programmer has written and checks the syntax to make sure the code the programmer has written is correct (This is partly what intellisence does). The parser passes what it has checked to the compiler. The compiler takes libraries, that are usually written in assembly language, but they could be written in a language like C/C++, then passes them to the code generator which makes creates the .exe file or equivalent like bytecode in Java or IL in C#/VB.NET.

That is a bit simplified but it is how things work in a compiler.