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I'm another C newbie who came across a statement in a book about C programming. In a chapter dealing with strings, the author said that a new computer language could be written using C. Nothing new there. Except he was implying it could all be done with string manipulation. I presume this new language would still be sent to a C compiler.
Can anyone here expand on this possibility?
Huh? What do you mean by "all done by string manipulation"? Of course you need string manipulation to parse the code but that's not everything of course.
Look at perl, I assume perl is written in C. I also think that C# is written in C but I don't know. Mono sure is. Oh know wait, I think C# was written in C# itself or something like this. ;) The world of compilers is full of wonders...
I agree with Spark. The author is probably only talking about the "Code Parsing", which is a must for any compiler. But this is not all to the development of a new language.
>a new computer language could be written using C.
I guess he meant that C can be used to write compilers and interpreters. C can be used to write compilers and interpreters for existing and new language. Note that both designing a language and writing a compiler or interpreter are quite complex things.
When creating software, you usually write code into a textfile which you pass to the compiler. A textfile can be seen as a collection of strings, so in that way the author of your book is correct. But it is too simple to say that writing compilers is just manipulating strings.