I was cleaning out my old papers (finally!) and came across an old paper I had titled “ Compiler Writing Tools using C# ” which essentially shows how you can write a number of tools like lex and yacc but instead of C/C++ on Unix, you use C# and .NET.
This paper covers the tokenizer, grammar , DFA , NFA , etc. I think conflicts and precedence is one area it would need a little more work. But overall its a very interesting piece of work - especially for one to learn the ropes if a lot of this is new.
Of course, writing compilers with C, overall is not the most productive experience (it sure is fun though!); if you have never done it before Standard ML or Haskell would be a better place to start. If you want to stick to .NET and roll out your own language (or create extensions) then check out this paper on MSDN .
All of this brought back memories when I wrote my own C++ compilers mainly with those tools on Unix System V and also on Xenix. Most people did not know (or perhaps remember) that Microsoft had a Unix version called Xenix which was later bought over by SCO and eventually become part of SCO Unix. Back in the days I use to run a dual-boot machine with Xenix and DOS. 😄