> I had a friend who was working on a master's in Comp Sci in oh, about 1982. 
> His professor gave him this thesis project:
> 
> Write a Pascal compiler.
> 
> In Pascal.
> 
> I can still hear in my mind the screams coming from late at night from 
> friend's apartment. He was NOT a happy camper for those two years. :D

Wee... I should have just grabbed a copy of Borland TurboPascal. It was 
written in TurboPascal! ;-)

I once had a go at writing a Pascal interpretter in BASIC. (Because I 
didn't have access to any computer that actually had a Pascal compiler 
or interpretter.) Of course, not knowing anything about computer science 
[because I was 11], I attempted to construct a program to edit, 
tokenise, parse, type-check and execute the Pascal source code all at 
once. This inevitably resulted in rapid and complete failure.

Today I understand that the correct thing to do would be to build a text 
editor, *then* try to make a compiler/interpretter. And have this thing 
process the souce code in several seperate stages, not all at once.

Basically I was trying to tackle a problem having no idea where to start 
or how to structure it.

I was only 11, after all...

Post a reply to this message