Creating your own language

Question

If I were looking to create my own language are there any tools that would help me along? I have heard of yacc but I\'m wondering how I would implement features that I want

Answer 1

I like Flex (Fast Lex) [Lexical scanner]
and Bison (A Hairy Yacc) [Yet another compiler compiler]

Both are free and available on all *NIX installations. For Windows just install cygwin.
But I old school.

By using these tools you can also find the lex rules and yacc gramers for a lot of popular languages on the internet. Thus providing you with a quick way to get up and running and then you can customize the grammers as you go.

Example: Arithmetic expression handling [order of precedence etc is a done to death problem] you can quickly get the grammer for this from the web.

An alternative to think about is to write a front-end extension to GCC.
Non Trivial but if you want a compiled language it saves a lot of work in the code generation section (you will still need to know love and understand flex/bison).