Re: Execution of a program in scripting language?

Peng Yu <pengyu.ut@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Could somebody pointing me some reference on how a script is executed
>so that I can understand the runtime behavior better?


For an example of a modern interpreter implementation, see: The
implementation of Lua 5.0 <http://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf> Lua has
a simple one-pass compiler that translates the source into a
register-based bytecode. It has an incremental mark/scan garbage
collector.


Perl is rather more old-school. It translates the source into an
intermediate representation that's more like a parse tree. It uses
reference-count garbage collection. The perlguts manual page has lots
of details. <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlguts.html>


The Unix shell is even more old-school. It works on the source
directly, performing a series of substitutions and expansions to
derive each command that is to be executed. Since there are no
significant layers of abstraction between the specification and the
implementation, POSIX provides as good a reference as any.
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html


Tony.
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