Thread: writing an interpreted language

I've been thinking of ideas for a new project, and one of the ones that i'm liking alot now is making an interpreted programming language that's compiled into C++, then compiled with a C++ compiler into an exe.

How difficult would this be to do?

Will the langauge that i create have any potential for use?

i'm also looking for someone with a few years of experience with varying programming languages to give me some syntax ideas and general advice.

any help is greatly appreciated.

your language may take some speed hits unless you can work constantly to avoid the traps... as for how easy it would be to code, i think itd be too simple for someone like you that has almost 1000 posts here . this is more like a "translated language". is that a new term?

well the way you plan on doing it, wouldn't be too hard. Basically be good with I/O and converting stuff to C++. Then you're set.

Now if you are making one that gets interpreted at run-time, that would be tricky.

>>i think itd be too simple for someone like you that has almost 1000 posts here

How do you know that 90% of his posts are not just things like:

Hrrmmm....

or:

C'mon...20 hits and not posts??

or:

How do I clear the screen?

Postcounts dont necessarily portray a person's ability to code, for eg. if some pro came to this board and had just signed up and had few posts, would you say that he was a newb just becuase of this fact?

Originally posted by face_master
>>i think itd be too simple for someone like you that has almost 1000 posts here

How do you know that 90% of his posts are not just things like:
orr:Postcounts dont necessarily portray a person's ability to code, for eg. if some pro came to this board and had just signed up and had few posts, would you say that he was a newb just becuase of this fact?

great speech ...

Potential use for an iterpreted language might be as a scripting language for games.

U can do it the easy way by cheating and just use C defines for the language:

A Basic style "define-language":

Code:

#define If if(
#define Then ){
#define EndIf }
#define Else }else{
#define Print(a) cout << a;

If true == false Then
    Print("True")
Else
    Print("False")
EndIf

put all the defines in a headerfile and include that file in all your "script-files"... compile with your standard compiler...

If you want code that compile and execute runtime... then thats another question...

a scripting language for a game wouldnt have to be translated to C++. it would be more like executing the code at runtime.

face_master, billholm: it also looks to me like Aran here is a mod.

This looks interesting. What you could do is make a lexicon, and by using switch/case statements you could execute instructions based on the data read from a file. I'm a newbie to C++ but in C it would be like

Code:

    FILE *fp;
    char str[80];

    fgets(&str, 80, fp);

    switch(str) 
      ...

i'm not a mod. and i'm actually a respected member here for my role in the GD board. I'm one of the people who first got ........ed of at one-line posts.

I also know my way around C++ to some extent, although i've most of the time figured out my problems myself instead of calling on you more-than-able fellows to solve them.

I'm going to first do that define thing, and see how it works.

then i'm going to try and write a parser and a compiler that compiles into C++ then puts that through a command line compiler.

this all should be very interesting.

thanks alot for all of your ideas and suggestions, everyone.

Hmm... weird... I've been thinking of doing the same... I just never got started... If you need any help with syntax and stuff, mail me...