Thank you all for your encouragement. I need to think about the core functionality, and do some reading.
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 AM, Josef Svenningsson <josef.svennings...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:05 AM, Jason Dagit <da...@codersbase.com> wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Michael Litchard <mich...@schmong.org> >> wrote: >>> >>> I'd like the community to give me feedback on the difficulty level of >>> implementing an awk interpreter. What language features would be >>> required? Specifically I'm hoping that TH is not necessary because I'm >>> nowhere near that skill level. >> > Implementing an awk interpreter in Haskell can be a fun project. I have a > half finished implementation lying around on the hard drive. It's perfectly > possible to implement it without using any super fancy language features. > But as other people have pointed out, monads are helpful for dealing with a > lot of the plumbing in the interpreter. >>> >>> An outline of a possible approach would be appreciated. I am using >>> http://www.math.utah.edu/docs/info/gawk_toc.html >>> as a guide to the language description. >> >> You might also focus on the 'core' of awk. Think about, what is the >> minimal language and start from there. Grow your implementation adding >> features bit by bit. It's also a good opportunity to do testing. You have >> a reference implementation and so you can write lots of tests for each >> feature as you add them. > > When I wrote my awk interpreter I decided to go for the whole language from > start. I had reasons for doing this as there were certain aspects of this > that I wanted to capture but it is not they way I would recommend going > about it. I definitely second Jason's advice at trying to capture the core > functionality first. > Have fun, > Josef _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
