When designing and implementing a new language, it is best to start by creating a grammar for the elements in your language, keeping in mind the semantics of each element as you go along.

For instance, your assignment might take on the form 

<assign> =: <assign-token> "->{\n" <assign-list> "}\n"

<assign-token> =: "\w+"

<assign-list> =: <assign-element> <assign-list> 
                 | (null)

<assign-element> =: "[0-9]+\n"

[download]
where nonterminal elements are in <> and literals and regexes are in "".

Once you have created a grammar you can implement it using Parse::RecDescent or your own recursive desecnt set of routines. Once you have the parser working, you can begin to create the translation routines.

Programming macro languages can be a bit tricky due to expansion rules. What gets expanded when? How do I quote expressions to prevent expansions? And so on. Two good examples of macro languages that deal with these issues are m4 and TeX. Both have good documentation.

-Mark

In reply to Re: A simple list oriented language in Perl by kvale
in thread A simple list oriented language in Perl by gmol

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.