In order to design and implement my own programming language, I needed to understand some language theory as well as compiler theory. I decided to learn about compilers first. With the help of several StackExchange posts and online forums, I came across a blog on designing a Pascal interpreter. The series of blog posts about designing the different parts of the interpreter and the gradual additions to it which added functionality proved to be an invaluable resource to me. Ultimately, the front-end of my compiler is structured very similarly to the one presented, just with a different language specification.

To test my knowledge, I wrote a language specification for logical expressions (a follow-on to a previous assignment in my computer science class), then programmed a lexer and parser that generated an abstract syntax tree from a logical expression string.