language coward

So I decided to write al60l in pure C. There are few reasons aside from the rational ones like that everybody speaks some C, that gcc itself is written mostly in C, and that the toolchain is stable, mature, etc. etc. Also there are more esoteric ones: such as that picking implementation language stronger than the implemented sucks, and writing algol parser in C++ is for cowards. Heck, with the expressivity of algol, I should probably pick pure assembly to justify the challenge.

However, what happened is not exactly what the previous paragraph suggests. I was doing KLOC investigation today. Sources of al60l as of time of this writing count something like 5000 lines (raw wc count). This includes flexer, yaccer, treecc ast nodes, and few C modules around. When instead of counting flex/yacc/treecc sources I count the generated C, it quickly ends up at 12000 lines. So tools are sparing me more than half the work! This is mostly good news, but unfortunately this qualifies me as 100% language coward. Oh well. So much for the pure C.