Chris Huff wrote:
> 
> In article <38cd0388$1@news.povray.org>, "Johannes Hubert"
> <jht### [at] mailacom> wrote:
> 
> > Just don't reinvent the wheel!
> 
> What if I want to learn how to make wheels? And what if I can't find a
> wheel that fits?

	Maybe you have not looked around? There are enough free ones out
there that I could make an 18-wheeler and have spares. Ain't a
dime's worth of difference among them in my never humble opinion. 

> > Parsing and compiling is a well researched subject in computer science.
> > I recommend that you take a look at lex/yacc for example

> While those might be good for people who want rapid development, I am
> not sure they would apply in my case. I do think there is a set of
> Bison/Flex(or is it Flexx?) tools for CodeWarrior, but I have never used
> that kind of thing.

	Not quite the same thing. In the days of patchpanels it was
considered a daunting task just to parse words (trailing
whitespace) properly. That turned out to be simple. Praise the
lord and pass the card deck. 

	Converting infix to postfix notation to machine language turned
out to be easy also. Doing so efficiently turned out to be a
bitch and half. How many passes does your compiler make? 

	I do not know about POV but it appears to make exactly one pass
before execution. 

> > One of the standard books is: "The Theory and Practice of Compiler
> > Writing" by Jean-Paul Tremblay and Paul G. Sorenson (McGraw Hill). It
> > covers everything you need...
> > (you probably have it already :)
> 
> Actually, I don't have it. All the books I have are a couple standard
> "learn C++" books:
> Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days(got this when I took C++ at school)
> Programming with C++
> Rescued by C++
> C++ Primer Plus(this one is actually my favorite, I rarely use the
> others)
> And a couple C and Java books, and one Pascal book(also from a class I
> took at school).

	That is something else entirely. The theory and practice of
compilers vice parsers (which are more like tokenizers in BASIC)
is something else entirely. Think about it. Everything you write
has to get to machine code instructions. 

	If there is anything I would like to see on POV it is a three or
four pass optimizing compiler against this single pass parser.
But then there are not enough gurus interested in this to do
that. 

> I don't have any books on algorithms or programming theory. I don't have
> much money to buy them either... :-(

	No library? 

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