Compiling a single language into JavaScript source code as well as C or C++ is going to be one hell of a trick. I think it'll be very difficult to keep the sema

Compiling a single language into JavaScript source code as well as C or C++ is going to be one hell of a trick. I think it'll be very difficult to keep the semantics the same, without resorting to running the equivalent of a JavaScript interpreter inside of your C++, but I wish you the best of luck with it. If you'd like to discuss the implementation, feel free to drop by #coffeescript on freenode. But to give you the rough outline -- the compiler is made up of (in order), a Lexer, Rewriter, Parser, and AST of Nodes. The lexer creates the tokens, the rewriter rewrites the stream of tokens, disambiguating parses and allowing for optional syntax, the parser generates the AST of nodes, and then "compile()" is called on the root node, and walks down the tree, compiling the JavaScript string recursively. For the parser, I'm using the excellent Jison parser generator for JavaScript, in LALR(1) mode. The only really unorthodox part of this is the Rewriter. It's not kosher to munge a token stream before parsing it -- but it's removed a ton of complexity from the grammar to not ever have to handle the syntactical edge cases, and to have them resolved in advance. All of the source is annotated, so here's some links: * Jison: http://github.com/zaach/jison http://github.com/zaach/jison * Lexer: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs/lexer.html http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs... * Rewriter: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs/rewriter.html http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs... * Grammar: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs/grammar.html http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...