Well, you can write your own guideline on how to prototype a language in SML, post it to NH, and profit.
Now we don't see your guideline but do see Flex/Bison/LLVM one.
Now we don't see your guideline but do see Flex/Bison/LLVM one.
I mean, more meat, examples, and soon quite a few more people know how to prototype a language in SML.
While it uses SML, it's not hard to follow if you use OCaml, and the bibliography / references are also quite helpful. The Ghuloum paper referenced elsewhere in the thread is also quite good (and uses Scheme, for better or worse).
Sad.
If you're completely lost, try starting with interpreters first. Compilers build on many of the same ideas, but interpreters are generally simpler. Read "The Art of the Interpreter" and/or SICP, and do the exercises. The former is a short paper, the latter is an excellent book expanding on it.
Just a short article showing how to get things done.
Exactly as one we're discussing.
There are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of articles and "how to" style pages on the web showing a concrete implementation of a small compiler for a toy language using lex/flex and yacc/bison, yet when asked for something similar in ML, SML, Haskell, whatever, the response is to be pointed at books and scholarly articles.
Where are the popular accounts of better compiler building with ML? Are there any? If not, why not?
Yes, building an industrial-strength compiler for a real-world langauge is a big and complex undertaking, but I feel the field would advance more quickly if more hackers had more access to more articles of the "Build a compiler in an afternoon" variety.
And I'd appreciate learning from it too, despite, or perhaps because of, my existing knowledge.
Here's[1] a post about an OCaml / LLVM article by Jon Harrop, but it's just an intro for an article in his (pay) OCaml Journal.
[1]: http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2008/09/writing-bytecode-compiler-using-llvm.htmlI'd love to see how clever they are, applaud them for it, and build on their work. They don't seem to care.
I'm curious about writing interpreters / compilers in Prolog (another language that seems particularly suited to prototyping them), as well, but I've already got plenty of projects.
Yeah, go for it...
Revisit the recent drama with twisted vs tornado.
By researching independently when given sufficient pointers. I posted a link to Abdul Azziz Ghoulum's paper which shows a full compiler in small baby steps, bootstrapped from the first line!
Research and conference papers are fairly good for learning, almost as good as blog posts.