Re: Want to get started - would like to write a simple interpreter

In 96-11-049 Norman Hilton <norman@kbss.bt.co.uk> writes:
>: I want to write an interpreter for a very simple language.
>: Can anyone give me some pointers on where to find the kind of
>: information I want?
>Try "Constructing Language Processors For Little Languages" by Randy
>M. Kaplan, published by John Wiley and Sons Inc., ISBN 0-471-59754-6.
>I have it but have not read it yet.


I bought this book on the basis of a recommendation I saw on Usenet
(probably comp.compilers) and a review at
http://frey.newcastle.edu.au/~acjbooks/Reviews/b675.r.nro and frankly
I was a little disappointed. I felt it didn't go deeply into the
subject at all, saying very little about the different ways of
handling flow control in interpreters (something which I had grappled
with myself in constructing my own "little language"). The book
suffered from the common fault of presenting too much code and too
little discursive material, at least in the chapters about the image
manipulation language. The code (disk not included) would have been
more useful if it had been tailored less to the specific application,
i.e. if a more general interpreter framework (with flow control!) had
been presented. However, I appreciate the author's choice was for
sound didactic reasons, and overall I think the book is a reasonable
introductory-level text.


If you really want to learn about elegance and power in the design of
little languages, take a look at the papers published about Lua
(metapage at http://csg.uwaterloo.ca/~lhf/lua/ ) and study the source
code. Neat!


Francis
--

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