How do you build a programming language?

Answer 1

This is a very large topic indeed and I fully recommend the book "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman. But the general process first involves first defining regular expressions that will be used to break up an input program into a series of tokens. The part of the compiler/interpreter that performs this function is called a scanner. From there a parser should be created based on the context free grammar of the language. Parsing produces a representation of the input program in memory called an abstract syntax tree. From that point a compiler can be created by generating assembly language for the program. Or an interpreter can be created by executing the abstract syntax tree directly.