writing a scripting language

[cimnik029]

I, for the pure fun of it, have decided to try to write a scripting engine and virtual machine. Does anyone have any resources to guide me in this undergoing? If found several sites (like the article on flipcode), but anyone have anything in specific that does everything without touching tools like Flex? I kinda wanna do it all by hand for the experience.

Btw, with the virtual machine, is their any benifit if "registers" are used? Would there be any tangable improvment if I had registers in the virtual machine to operate on as well as the stack or would it make no real difference considering the time to copy data back and forth?

Thanks

[wtd]

A stack-based virtual machine is easier to implement.

Your major obstacle, though, is like going to be parsing the source for your "scripting" language. For this the classic tools are Yacc and Lex or the newer Flex and Bison.

Also look into higher-level languages with parsing tools. They can be much easier to use.