Compiler 2000

So I've been sidetracked a bit. I've been sick - dizzy for almost a week. The ThoughtWorkers, Ben and I have a release in two days, and I'm supposed to present on web frameworks next week with an emphasis on testing. I still haven't had a chance to get my Agitar examples to post either. But, that won't stop me from learning and writing about compilers.

So, I figured out my compiler from 2000! I'm really excited about this. It only took a few minutes. I didn't figure it out in huge detail but I want to give the gist of what I did figure out. First I'll start with a quick overview of the steps:

1. Define the input language grammar
2. Run javacc on the grammar to produce a parser/generator
3. Write a file in the input language
4. Run the parser/generator on the file created in step 4 to produce Java byte code in Text
   
5. Run jasmin to convert the human readable Java byte code to a Java class file
   
6. Run the class generated by jasmin on the JVM.

There's certainly some details missing here. How do you go from a grammar to a Parser/Generator? Its pretty common to go from the grammar to a parser, but the generator as well? Hmm. This one I might actually have trouble explaining but I do know how it works.

The grammar I build that is used by JavaCC has references to classes that I wrote that do the generation. JavaCC generates the parser that creates the AST comprised of the classes I wrote. These classes have the generation logic build in. Once the parser builds the tree it can just ask the root node to start generation and all the nodes get visited in the proper order, generating code.

I realize this all makes me sound naive about well, everything, but it was literally 5 minutes or reading old code, one and a half chapters in the dragon book, and thats about it. I have a lot of catching up to do, but I'm making progress already. Now that I know I have a complete working model that I built, I should be able to tinker with it quite a bit and post more.