There's a thing at my school where we have to sign up to do a project over the summer. The project can be almost anything, but it has to be well thought out and described on paper, or it won't be accepted. I signed up to learn ASM (knowing nothing about it at the time) and as a demonstration of having learned it, I decided that I would create a basic HLL using ASM.

Now, I've chosen an assembler and begun to learn it, and have hit a brick wall. I am nowhere near being able to create a compiler for an HLL. All I need is one that can create loops and if statements, and do output and input easily, but I can't even do that. The deadline is at the end of August.

I do have one advantage. The board I have to present the project to will be made up of people who know nothing about programming, so I can talk over their heads. I just have to show them I did something with FASM in the process.

Does anyone have any tutorials or source code or anything that I could look at to figure out how to make a compiler for an HLL? I'd like to learn FASM as a whole in the future, but for now I only need to know how to create compilers.

Here's what I would like to do, if I can (I may have to completely abandon this). The features:

-Compile directly from a .txt (so you can code in notepad or whatever).
-Compile directly to a .exe, with the option of compiling into a .asm source file (FASM syntax, of course).
-Allow inline FASM.
-Have functions for input and output.
-Have control structures (if statements, while, do-while loops).
-Variable creation and manipulation.

Basically, that's all I need. I could probably get away with doing even less.

You have half of the work done with hll macros shipped on standard win32 fasm package. Decide which syntax you want and start from there.

Use fasm as the compiler and your txt will show the language you create.
Writing a parser is somehow more complex and time consumming. Deadline is imminent so doing it with macros will permit you to concentrate on the language and not on bugfixing.

Post your macros as you develop them and you will find here people that could help you in the process.

I have to agree with pelaillo, writting a parser is too complex to be finished in one month.
AFAIK, the best "tutorial" is Dragon Book - Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, USA, 1986

And again pelaillo is right, FASM has very strong macro capabilities, so it's easier to write some "envelope" macro for each statement of your HLL.
E.g. it's possible to write C-like "printf" macro, which will call in turn wvsprintf, GetStdHandle & WriteFile to write something to concole.
Though I have no ideas haw to implement "A=B+C" stuff

Thank you for your help. I will probably need a lot of help, since I am new to this, and ASM is very different from the previous languages I have learned.

Wait, I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that I should modify the FASM compiler to allow HLL-type macros?

Given the timetable involved, I'd say just write HLL macros in FASM and use 'include' to include them with your programs. It'd be similar to the way C is built up from a small core set of functions. In this case, FASM would be the core, and your macros+library would replace LIBC.

Oh, I see.

In the last three days I wrote a sort of "precompiler" in Java that takes code written in the Spoon Language (the language I created) and "compiles" it into FASM source code. I still plan to write a compiler in FASM, but if all else fails, I can hand in the piece of junk I created in Java.

When I'm done tweaking the Java code, I might toss it up here. Even though it is written in Java (and therefore is unbearably slow) it does cut down on some of the more tedious coding, and could be a really helpful coding tool if rewritten in FASM.