How to Write a Scripting Language using C? [closed]

Question

How to Write a Scripting Language using C? Any Idea? Links?

Answer 1

Do you mean, how to write a language that is interpreted in C?

If so, you'll want to check Wikipedia and other sources on the following topics:

• Lexical Analysis (converting source code into tokens, like keywords, integer/float literals, string literals, etc.)
• Parsing (checking those tokens against a predefined, usually context-free grammar to make sure the program is syntactically correct)
• Syntax Trees (usually constructed during parsing; create an intermediate tree representation that can be traversed in order to execute the code)
• Symbol Tables (Basically, how to look up variable names)
• Peephole Optimizations (if you want to make your code run faster, in exchange for taking more time during the pre-execution stage)

It's a lot more work than you might think... Happy reading!

Answer 2

You can take a look at the book "The UNIX programming environment"

_{(source: bell-labs.com)}

At the end of the book, and pretty much the last chapter, the authors, wrote a small interpreter in C with enough and detailed information step by step. Very interesting and very easy to follow.

The source code of that interpreter is here

Answer 3

Why not look at the C-Code for a (easy) scripting language? Maybe Lua? (link )

Maybe you should also read somesthing about parser generators, which are the first building block that your program can interpret a language. The second block is to actually do, what was being parsed (sometimes you can integrate that into the parser, it can callback functions at each token/each structure being parsed). Easy examples, like parsing and executing math formulas could help.