monic part 5: writing C programs on the calculator

[robve]

Definitely option b). By contrast, it will quickly become much more complicated to complete option a) when the language gets more complex.

Option b) is not as difficult to comprehend as you may think.

You could implement this with a hand-written lexical analyzer and write a recursive descent parser to do the translation. Or use flex and bison. The first chapters of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:..._and_Tools aka the "(Red) Dragon Book" shows how. Here are some lecture notes to get started.

To limit the syntax to arithmetic syntax, operator precedence parsers are very handy and relatively easy to implement, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator-p...nce_parser

The syntax of Prolog is parsed with operator precedence parsing. The interesting part is that the language syntax itself can be extended on the fly by the user defining his/her prefix, index, and postfix operators.

Also Pakrat parsing has gained some popularity, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_ex...on_grammar

Hope this helps!