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copied!<p>There are a lot you can use, what you will find easiest will depend on your experience.</p> <p>Firstly as regards the language:</p> <ol> <li>The simplest is a toy language, for example compiling an arithmetic expressions.</li> <li>Next is an assembler - again really just translating but shows the basics of parsing and turning into op-codes</li> <li>Next is probably something like C, which is very close to pure assembler, or something like LISP which is very close to pure theory.</li> </ol> <p>Next, choosing your compiler.</p> <p>You could start with an assembler - turning assembler into machine code. This was the first step in producing compilers - I'd suggest for a chip like the <a href="http://www.6502.org/tools/lang/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">6502</a> or 8080 which are both very simple. Something like the <a href="http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/AsmTools/RollYourOwn/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">assembler's development kit</a> might work well for you (it comes with examples)</p> <p>Many people (including me) would argue the easiest languages to write compilers in are functional - nowadays that probably means Haskell, Scheme or Common Lisp. An example of how easy it is is <a href="http://blog.poucet.org/2007/06/simplistic-compiler-in-haskell/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this blog post</a>. He writes a compiler that just compiles arithmetic expressions in a few lines. This might be minimal enough for you.</p> <p>Almost every introduction to writing compilers at the academic level starts with a minimal language as an example, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Book_%28computer_science%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the Dragon Book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Book_%28computer_science%29</a> is always recommended, but there are other good ones.</p> <p>At University I used C-- which is like C but even easier to write a compiler for. Lots of resources at: <a href="http://www.cminusminus.org/qc--.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.cminusminus.org/qc--.html</a></p> <p>If you wanted a compiler and you know a language like Java I'd suggest something like <a href="https://javacc.dev.java.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">JavaCC</a>, where the language is specified using grammars. There are <a href="https://javacc.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=110" rel="nofollow noreferrer">lots of example grammars here</a> - pick something simple like C to get started.</p>

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