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PROJECT: A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Building your own programming language is surprisingly easy (as long as you do not aim too high) and very enlightening.
The main thing I want to show in this chapter is that there’s no magic involved in building a programming language. I’ve often felt that some human inventions were so immensely clever and complicated that I’d never be able to understand them. But with a little reading and experimenting, they often turn out to be quite mundane.
We will build a programming language called Egg. It will be a tiny, simple language—but one that is powerful enough to express any computation you can think of. It will allow simple abstraction based on functions.
Parsing
The most immediately visible part of a programming ...
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