* Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org> [Fri, 3 Jul 2009 13:03:03
+0100]:
Writing an interpreter for a language is not trivial. Writing it in C,
and then porting to PHP is even worse.
Many of languages "resemble" syntax of C language (curly braces,
plusplus/minusminus and so on), but with "lousy" typing (numerical
strings transparently mixed with numbers, floats "mixed" with integers).
Add a dollar sign prefix to variable names to JS code and lots of
_simple_ JS code would be really similar to PHP. I wonder whether that
helps to translate?
BTW, one of LOGO interpreter distributions (an educational functional
language) has a partial (incomplete but working) interpreter of Pascal
language just in about 20-30KB! It's amazing! it seems that writing
interpreter with another interpreter is much easier than by using
low-level language like C. I am not sure whether Logo is suitable,
though - I am not expert in translation in any way.
Dmitriy