Dev Reboot

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal, Technical

Chu Hang was right: you can’t just dive into development without proper planning. Thinking that I’ve “got it” with the whole interpreter thingy, I jumped into development. The initial parts was easy enough, creating a lexer, which is able to recognize strings, identifiers, numbers, operators from user input (in the form of text). The lexer recognizes these and splits user input (codes) into tokens.

But then, things turned ugly. Making sense of these tokens turned out to be much, much more difficult. There was just so many possible input forms that parsing the tokens was terribly complicated. It was like looking up Mount Everest, and all I had was slippers.

Then my bro sent me a link of an expression “evaluater” written in C#. It also turned out that the evaluater extends on source code generated by a software called ANTLR.

I thought of using a similar approach, using ANTLR to quickly generate the lexer and parser components. All I had to do is to define the grammar rules. But you see, I hardly understand the article (the one explaining the expression evaluater). I realized, I need to do more reading.

Incidentally, the ANTLR site had a link to a “Programming Languages” course. Well, since my seminar topic is gonna be something on this, so no harm reading. For all you know, I can do something much more deeper, like garbage collection techniques, memory allocation techniques etc.

Programming Languages

But then of course, I also need to allocate some time to read Langfords’ Beginning Photography, which is a pretty damn good book I’d say, with plenty of photos as samples. After all, how else to learn photography without photos??

Beginning Photography

Reading up on theory can be boring. Wish me luck!!

Permalink | May 26th, 2007

3 Responses to “Dev Reboot”

  1. Jinny Says:
    May 26th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

    I’ve got some useful stuff on programming languages and a very good book on interpreters, compilers construction etc, it’s like my Bible when I was doing Prog Lang and writing my compilers too. If you wanna borrow I could lend you the book..

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    May 26th, 2007 at 10:55 pm

    Gasp! Another book? Speaking of books, I’ve already photocopied one from my college library, which I’ve hardly read! I’ll see if I the online one is good enough, else I’d finally have the chance to meet you personally ;-)

  3. Jinny Says:
    May 27th, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    Well, let me know if you want my stuff. The book I was referring to is a damn good book, it’s like a bible, plus I have some stuff which are my monash tutes/assignments/sample exams which, used together with the book, is a damn good resource.

    I live in Kelana Jaya now btw, so meeting up might be easier for you now :)

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