Is it possible to create an AST for any arbitrary programming language or IR using C or C++ alone (without the help of tools like YACC and LEX )?
If so, how to implement the lexical and syntactic analysis ?
If not, what are the tools that have to augmented to C or C++ to successfully create an AST ?
Hope I made my doubt clear. If My question looks vague or out of context, please indicate the required.
P.S : I Am actually trying to create the AST for the LLVM’s .ll format of IR representation. I do know that .ll is derived from AST. But I am trying out static analysis practices. So I am looking at creating the AST.
The most straight-forward methodology for creating the parser without a parser-generator is recursive descent. It is very well documented – the standard book in the field is The Dragon Book.
A scanner, that takes text as input and produces a string of tokens as output, can be written using standard string manipulation techniques.