At last, a guide that makes creating a language with its associated
baggage of lexers, parsers and compilers, accessible to mere mortals,
rather to a group of a few hardcore eclectics as it stood until now.
The first thing that catches the eye, is the subtitle:
The unix philosophy applied to language design, for GPLs and DSLs"
What is meant by "unix philosophy" ?. It's taking simple,
high quality components and combining them together in smart ways to
obtain a complex result; the exact approach the book adopts.
I'm getting ahead here, but a first sample of this philosophy becomes
apparent at the beginnings of Chapter 5 where the Parser treats and
calls the Lexer like unix's pipes as in lexer|parser. Until the end of
the book, this pipeline is going to become larger, like a chain, due to
the amount of components that end up interacting together.
The book opens by putting things into perspective in Chapter 1: Motivation: why do you want to build lan…
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