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copied!<p>I would familiarize myself with the problem first by reading up on some of the literature that's available on the subject. The classic <em>Compilers</em> book by Aho et. al. may be heavy on the math and comp sci, but a much more aproachable text is the <a href="http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/" rel="noreferrer"><em>Let's Build a Compiler</em></a> articles by Jack Crenshaw. This is a series of articles that Mr. Crenshaw wrote back in the late 80's and it's the most under-appreciated text on compilers ever written. The approach is simple and to the point: Mr. Crenshaw shows "<strong>A</strong>" approach that works. You can easily go through the content in the span of a few evenings and have a much better understanding of what a compiler is all about. A couple of caveats are that the examples in the text are written in Turbo Pascal and the compilers emit 68K assembler. The examples are easy enough to port to a more current programming language and I recomment Python for that. But if you want to follow along as the examples are presented you will at least need <a href="http://dn.codegear.com/article/20803" rel="noreferrer">Turbo Pascal 5.5</a> and <a href="http://www.easy68k.com/" rel="noreferrer">a 68K assembler and emulator</a>. The text is still relevant today and using these old technologies is really fun. I highly recommend it as anyone's first text on compilers. The great news is that languages like Python and Ruby are open sourced and you can download and study the C source code in order to better understand how it's done. </p>

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