Writing interactive compilers and interpreters
by Peter John Brown · first published 1979
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The literature on interpreters (vs. compilers) is pretty thin. I enjoyed reading these: 1. Peter John Brown. 1979. Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters. 2. Timothy Budd. 1987. A Little Smalltalk. 3. Ralph E. Griswold. 2000. The Icon Programming Language, 3e. 4. Pat Shaughnessy. 2013. Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals.…
on “Crafting Interpreters: A Review” ↗Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters by Peter John Brown (1979) is quirky in the sense that he paid unusual attention to the literary quality of his prose. Among his admonitions for writing user manuals is this: Read. Books on overall…
on “Quirky computing books” ↗…statements to debug the code. TSB BASIC didn't have compile/link steps, it tokenized the code as you entered the lines, and the interpreter amounted to a big switch statements on the tokens. P. J Brown's book Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters (1981) describes how TSB works. Eventually I got the source code to TSB (written in assembler) and figured it out for myself. Other BASIC implementations that popped up around the same time had richer…
on “Greppability is an underrated code metric” ↗