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You could take a look at Marc Cournoyer's course http://createyourproglang.com, check out the compiler course on Cousera https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers and watch Rob Pikes talk on lexical scanning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE.b

That should get you going. Oh and don't forget to have a look at Go language specification as well.

what makes the go language a good example?

The language spec is very short compared to others.

thanks!

what about these "PEG" parsers? when/why do they make sense?

"PEG-based transformer provides front-, middle and back-end stages in a simple compiler"