Applicability to other software engineering tasks
The tools and technologies you learn about from building your own programming language can be applied to a range of other software engineering tasks. For example, you can sort almost any file or network input processing task into three categories:
- Reading XML data with an XML library
- Reading JSON data with a JSON library
- Reading anything else by writing code to parse it in its native format
The technologies in this book are useful in a wide array of software engineering tasks, which is where the third of these categories is encountered. Frequently structured data must be read in a custom file format.
For some of you, the experience of building your own programming language might be the single largest program you have written thus far. If you persist and finish it, it will teach you lots of practical software engineering skills, besides whatever you learn about compilers and interpreters and such. This will include working with large dynamic data structures, software testing, and debugging complex problems, among other skills.
That's enough of the inspirational motivation. Let's talk about what you should do first: figure out your requirements.
