Writing your own programming language is incredibly daunting. But if you start by writing a language that evaluates very simple functions it opens your mind to the possibility of writing an entire language and gives you a better understanding of what that would entail. So let’s start there. Let’s write a programming language that adds and multiplies numbers.
What’s in a Programming Language?
1. Parsers: Functions that read input and then tell the program what to do with it
2. Data Structure: The parser puts our input into an abstract syntax which our program can then evaluate
3. Nodes: Each node on the tree represents a value or expression which can then be evaluated to give us a value
Continue reading