Re: Searching for books on how to write a scripting language (Newbie, sorry)

> I am searching for books that deal with how to create your own
> scripting engine. I am more or less interested in doing this as an
> exercise.


"scripting" is a relatively recent buzzword, so you might not turn up
a lot with that as a keyword, however anything on implementing
interpreters or interactive languages should be relevant.


>[Haven't seen one other than Brown's old interpreter book. On the other
>hand, there are many scripting languages available on-line with full
>source including tcl, python, and lua. Read the source. -John]


Buy all means: "Use the source, Luke"!
Other places to look:


There are several books on Lisp/Scheme or Forth internals which would
be useful. Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" and an old BYTE book on writing
TILs (Threaded Interpretive Languages) come to mind. Also Griswold's
book on the implementation of Icon.


The "lost chapters" from the "blue book" on the Smalltalk VM is online:
<http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_imp_toc.html>


Some notes on Forth implementations by Brad Rodriguez:
  <http://www.zetetics.com/bj/papers/index.html>


Java isn't interactive enough to be used as a scripting language, but
it's got some dynamic features and the JVM has been used as the engine
for other languages ( Jpython, Kawa, ... ), but the main benefit is that
there's lots written and still in print about the JVM. For online info,
see especially Bill Venners "Under the Hood" articles in Javaworld:
<http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/topicalindex/jw-ti-hood.html>


And there's a whole lot of literature on dynamic dispatch, but but
that may be more exercise than you're looking for. ;-)




---| Steven D. Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU> |---
---| Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics |---
---| University of Virginia Health Sciences Center |---
---| P.O. Box 10011 Charlottesville, VA 22906-0011 |---

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.