Thread: Have you ever written a compiler?

I'm working on a really 'neat' project right now that involves the development of a basic opcode interpreter. It is similar to assembly in that it only interprets (and executes) a single instruction at a time. However, each 'instruction' does more than just move a number around in registers, or push and pop things in and out of memory. The only limit to the complexity is that the instruction cannot use more than a 3D vector, a scalar, and a byte (that's sort of the definition of the size of an instruction). If it uses any more than that, it gets broken down into multiple instructions.

The cool thing about that is you can write your own programs in a text file by stringing together these basic instructions, and the opcode interpreter reads it in and basically 'compiles' a program (well, interprets it).

This is an AI program that uses genetic algorithms to sort of evolve specimens over time such that they can execute certain types of behaviors efficiently (although they don't learn new behavior...the pinnacle of artificial intelligence research).

>BTW: The text book that we have is Compiler Construction Principles and Practice by Kenneth C. Louden

I'm going take a rather tasty intro course on it in a short week or so, I await it but thank you for such a tip as there is no required textbook, though a recommended one. It would be nice if I could get all my lexical questions answered, top of the list: why? =)

Yeah, I hear ya. People that write everything required to compile C / C++ code (including everything you mentioned) are gods, nuff said.

Originally Posted by doubleanti

>BTW: The text book that we have is Compiler Construction Principles and Practice by Kenneth C. Louden

I'm going take a rather tasty intro course on it in a short week or so, I await it but thank you for such a tip as there is no required textbook, though a recommended one. It would be nice if I could get all my lexical questions answered, top of the list: why? =)

It's a nice textbook indeed, and it comes with a compiler of a "toy" language called TINY ( 4000+ line of code )which is based on Pascal... and it goes towards making a compiler of a language called C- ( C minus ) which is simmilar to C but simpler, but at the same time more complex than TINY. It discusses many methods for each phase of the compiler.

And thank you all for your input.