> I think its more about learning how its done and finding a different
> (maybe better) way to do it.

Yes. Take a deep breath and dive. Unless you have taken a course in
compilers you will need to work hard to understand the existing solutions
first, before you come up with something new and unexpected. You have to
understand that everyone who wrote a computer language, interpreted or
not, in the last ~50 years, has walked down this path at some time or
other, so solutions may exist for what you are trying to do.

The reference university text book is 'The Dragon Book', which is actually
called 'Compilers, Principles, Techniques and Tools' by Aho, Sethi and
Ullman (Addision Wesley). It has gone through X editions so far and it is
called the dragon book because of the dragon picture on the cover.

This is a university textbook and like any university textbooks it
contains only the theory of fishing, and no fish ;-)

A better book for finding fish imho is 'Unix Tool Building' by Kenneth
Ingham (Academic Press / Harcourt Brace).

The regular expressions that define a grammar can get pretty complex fast
and 'Mastering Regular Expressions' by Friedl (O'Reilly) will help here.

I understand that the most notable feature that defines parser grammars is
the complete lack of comments therein no matter who wrote them ;-).

The largest problem wrt grammars and newbies is, that a grammar is a 5th
generation computer language and almost none of the mistakes made there
lead to direct effects (i.e. you need to understand how it all works to
find the logical fault).

There are also other books about this (many). They are usually specialized
and require a lot of background.

Peter

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