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Why Build Another Programming Language?

This book will show you how to build your own programming language, but first, you should ask yourself, why would I want to do this? For a few of you, the answer will be simple: because it is so much fun. However, for the rest of us, it is a lot of work to build a programming language, and we need to be sure about it before we make that kind of effort. Do you have the patience and persistence that it takes?

This chapter points out a few good reasons to build your own programming language, as well as some circumstances in which you don’t need to build your contemplated language. After all, designing a class library for your application domain is often simpler and just as effective. However, libraries ...

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