Oh yeah. I read the original question as 'I know about lex/yacc' or their modern equivalents flex/bison.. but I guess not. You can do a lot just with lex/flex,

Oh yeah. I read the original question as 'I know about lex/yacc' or their modern equivalents flex/bison.. but I guess not. You can do a lot just with lex/flex, e.g. it's fine for small languages. Probably play around with that before attempting something insanely ambitious. Also, I'm not sure how getting to the first-ever-designed language will help with anything, as you (OP) seem to be trying to do. Probably it's not being aware of lexical analysis (lex family) + parsing (yacc family) . There are some great books on those.