Saturday 29 December 2012

Melc


Every life form wants to live, naturally, but as our lifespan is limited the next best thing we can do is making sure our species survives. This applies to programmers too, as a species. For some time I've been haunted by the thought that I'll never be a real programmer until I write a compiler and the species metaphor I've come up with 5 minutes ago made a lot of sense. Joking aside, now I'm going to present Melc, a compiler-compiler.

Melc is a compiler-compiler or compiler generator that builds a recursive descent parser corresponding to whatever grammar it's been given. The grammar is written in SEBNF, which is a variation on EBNF. The specification including some examples is available on GitHub. I'm going to go on developing this and writing more examples in the year to come.