Writing a compiler

The problem I remember most from being a young programmer (13 years old or so) was figuring out how to parse and evaluate expressions. It seemed like a black art. It was Jack Crenshaw's compiler tutorial which eventually sorted me out, several years later.

In homage to Crenshaw, I'm going to write a little series on how to write a compiler, updated to use C# 2.0 / .NET. Maybe somebody else out there will find it enlightening.

The project will cover the following areas:

1. How compilers are structured.
2. A lexer for lexical analysis.
3. A parser for syntactic analysis and parse-time evaluation.
4. Designing of a virtual machine.
5. A simple virtual machine.
6. A new parser generating code for the virtual machine.
7. Type analysis and operator overloading.

Each area will be covered in one or more blog posts (as needed), building up from the previous posts to a final finished little language; how capable remains to be seen.