What language do they build other languages with?

Question

What language is used to build low level languages like c++ and java?

How could you build the first language with no language?

Answer 1

As mentioned by the other posters, you can write a language in practically any language, and often one of the first programs written in a language is a compiler for the language itself.

However, there are some languages that were specially developed for writing computer languages - namely lex, yacc, flex, bison (updated versions of lex and yacc). These allow you to represent the lexical and grammatical specification of some languages (I believe LLR, or LALR) in a form that can be compiled into an efficient language recognizer.

You do still have to write other parts of the language compiler/interpreter yourself, i.e. semantic analysis, code generation.

See

http://dinosaur.compilertools.net/