Re: Advice needed: book on interpreter construction

> [...] I'm
>looking for a good book that deals with interpreters--I've got several
>compiler books but they aren't really much help. A book with example
>code (even fragments) would be very useful as I'm in a big hurry.
>
>[I compile to byte codes or a tree and then interpret that, keeping
>intermediate results on a stack. It's easier than compiling for a
>real machine mostly because you can change the target machine to make
>it easier to compile for. -John]


If you need to do something approximating John's suggest quickly, you could
simply bastardize Lex to substitute subroutine pointers for tokens, build
tree of same and traverse the tree. To keep things simple, you may want to
forgo the implementation of any control structure and simply traverse the
tree once per data record. If your record names and types are always the
same, this too could be hard-coded with offsets to an array of pointers to
the data structures to shorten implementation time.
  Compiler Design in C (Allen Holub, ISBN 0-13-155045-4) includes a complete
discussion of Lex as well as source for what seems a more straightforward
version of same -- this might be the best reference for what you're trying
to do.


---
Brian V. McGroarty -- brianmcg@bix.com -- phone/fax (708) 439-7714*
*(847) 439-7714 as of 1/20/96
--

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