monic part 5: writing C programs on the calculator

[Jonathan Busby]

(01-06-2021 09:59 AM)vaklaff Wrote:  Tools like flex and bison can help tremendously. It's been a while since I used them last time but IIRC you get by with just cursory knowledge of the grammars theory.

I second using Flex and Bison instead of rolling your own parser as it's *much* easier. You should get the book "flex & bison: Text Processing Tools" by by John Levine and published by O'Reilly. The book has a well written introduction to BNF grammars. I skipped that part though as I've read the "Dragon book" and due to my knowledge of theoretical computer science from uni. A fellow HP48 hacker and I were coding a "high-level assembler" for the Saturn processor with the "assembler" being a kind of C and Saturn assembly hybrid. I had bought both the paperback and Kindle editions of the book and it was a really great read -- it made coding the assembler / compiler or whatever-you-want-to-call-it *much* easier than rolling our own as the C99 grammar is very complicated. The project is on hold now as I've had numerous other things to deal with in my Real Life [TM], but I'll eventually get back to it and finish it, hopefully

Regards,

Jonathan