For my spread­sheet pro­jec­t, I had to re­do some­thing I had for­got­ten about: cell dis­place­men­t. I did that once when the for­mu­la lan­guage was python.

At the time, I parsed the python us­ing the to­k­enize mod­ule and Ka-Ping Yee's re­gur­gi­tate.

Python->­To­ken­s->Dis­place cell­s->re­gur­gi­tate->Python

Since I have lots of oth­er things to do, I de­cid­ed to do it the same way, and wrote the equiv­a­lent of re­gur­gi­tate for Trax­ter, my for­mu­la lan­guage.

It turns out it was not re­al­ly hard, but I had to re­do parts of the pars­er so it kept more in­for­ma­tion about the source.

Af­ter that it was sim­ple, you see, Trax­ter com­piles to Python. That means all I had to do was an­oth­er (very sim­i­lar) back­end, and there it is, a Trax­ter-­to-­Trax­ter com­pil­er. Or de­com­pil­er. Or some­thing. And rel­a­tive cell ref­er­ences are work­ing again (and now with the right syn­tax).