Pat Shaughnessy's Ruby Under a Microscope[1] is a fantastic resource for looking at Ruby's internals, especially concerning parsing, Ruby's class structure, and the YARV virtual machine.
It's probably easiest to begin with a Lisp dialect, since a basic one needs only two data types (singly-linked lists and symbols) and its eval function is so simple. Peter Norvig has a great tutorial[2] on implementing a Lisp in Python.
Beyond that, it can be helpful to look at the source code for other languages similar to what you're looking to create, to get a sense of how they do things.
That's more or less what I found helpful, in any case. Good luck!
Comments
Pat Shaughnessy's Ruby Under a Microscope[1] is a fantastic resource for looking at Ruby's internals, especially concerning parsing, Ruby's class structure, and the YARV virtual machine.
It's probably easiest to begin with a Lisp dialect, since a basic one needs only two data types (singly-linked lists and symbols) and its eval function is so simple. Peter Norvig has a great tutorial[2] on implementing a Lisp in Python.
Beyond that, it can be helpful to look at the source code for other languages similar to what you're looking to create, to get a sense of how they do things.
That's more or less what I found helpful, in any case. Good luck!
[1] http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope [2] http://norvig.com/lispy.html