The industry standard is known as the ''Dragon book'' by Aho etc al. Its actual title is ''Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools''
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201100886/qid=1049840066/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-6781748-9940121

It is very expensive, so I recomend getting it from a university library.

It''s over 10 years old, but it is still the best. I''m sure I wont be the last person recommending this book to you.

The Dragon Book is still good, but it''s not what I''d call the "best" anymore. It''s definately showing it''s age. I still recommend picking it up, but a far better book is the recent "Modern Compiler Design":

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471976970/qid=1049947481/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-0890133-6456946?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Also, I wrote this one book called Game Scripting something or other:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931841578/qid%3D1049947504/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-0890133-6456946

You might learn a thing or two. But if you don''t, it''s really big so it''s great for incapacitating home intruders or evening out wobbly tables.

scripting languages?

python, ruby, lua



Or maybe boost.spirit

quote:Spirit is an object oriented recursive descent parser generator framework implemented using template meta-programming techniques. Expression templates allow us to approximate the syntax of Extended Backus Normal Form (EBNF) completely in C++. Parser objects are composed through operator overloading and the result is a backtracking LL(inf) parser that is capable of parsing rather ambiguous grammars.

The Spirit framework enables a target grammar to be written exclusively in C++. Inline EBNF grammar specifications can mix freely with other C++ code and, thanks to the generative power of C++ templates, are immediately executable. In retrospect, conventional compiler-compilers or parser-generators have to perform an additional translation step from the source EBNF code to C or C++ code.

[edited by - petewood on April 10, 2003 3:52:23 PM]

How about SMALL? I know for a fact a few commercial games have shipped using this scripting language and is pretty solid. The memory management I found better than all the alternatives given above.

http://www.compuphase.com/small.htm

Check it out.

-JT

quote:Original post by DakeDesu
If anything, this mini project's only goals are tobecome Turing Complete (or whatever the proper term for that is).

For that, you only need loop (or recursion), branch and memory allocation. Turing completeness is something of a red herring, as it doesn't tell you anything about the usefulness of a language. For example, the C language minus the libraries is merely a Finite State Automata. Another example: Unlambda is Turing complete, but is useless for practical purposes.

If you're just looking to implement some sort of interpreter, you might consider a simplified dialect of Lisp, which is quite straightforward since it has such a simple and consistent syntax. In many other programming languages, the complexity of the interpreter is focused around applying arbitrary grammatical rules to transform conforming syntax into an AST.

For example, given a C++ style infix expression looking like this:

x + y * z;    

The parser needs to generate an AST that looks something like:

     +    /    x   *      /      y   z 

If you then perform a preorder traversal of this AST, printing each node and using parentheses to delimit functions, then you get this:

(+ x (* y z))    

Which is a Lisp expression! So, the parsing process for the infix grammar is simply a transformation from an arbitrary syntax to something that can be directly represented using Lisp s-expressions.

Edit: editing has resulted in my AST being munged. Oh well...


[edited by - SabreMan on April 11, 2003 12:49:24 PM]