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Crafting Interpreters

craftinginterpreters.com

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Re: Crafting Interpreters

#121

Post by PhilipRoman »

fooker wrote: post #76

This book should be the second or maybe third step of your journey into PL compilers. The first step is to write an interpreter yourself, for a simple language you create, without knowing anything about interpreters or language design. The second step is to rewrite it, and make less mistakes! :) If you don't do this, you are never going to appreciate the nuances of this topic. And you are going to skip over concepts…

That brings back some memories... Having just started learning Java I wanted to create my own language. It wasn't that bad, I even managed to implement an operator precedence algorithm without looking it up. It worked by scanning the list of tokens and each time finding the highest priority subexpression. There was no recursion involved, just good old manual pushing and popping on a stack.

The problem was that I didn't really understand parsing so most of the language was implemented using copious amounts of string.split and string.replace, predictably leading to some concepts not being nestable. Really wish I had archived the source code for that.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#122

Post by kqr »

For someone who has sporadically worked through large parts of the dragon book over time (I'm not sure the dragon book is appropriate to consume from cover to cover), and written a couple of tiny interpreters and compilers for fun -- will committing the time for Crafting Interpreters book be revelatory or more of the same? I've long been curious.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#123

Post by fuzztester »

chris37879 wrote: post #8

I feel like this is a book most programmers should work through at some point or another. Doing so made me really appreciate just what's going on inside a compiler / language toolkit. It's also one of the most well written technical guides I've ever followed, it really helped me internalize the concepts, and they are useful all over the place, not just in compilers.

>really helped me internalize the concepts, and they are useful all over the place, not just in compilers.

Which are some of those places? Parsing data formats could be one, I guess.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#124

Post by WJW »

munificent wrote: post #120

Author here. Seeing all of the positive comments about my book is really warming my heart. I appreciate everyone and I'm glad so many people have enjoyed the book. I put a ton of time and love into it and it's gratifying to see it had the effect I'd hoped for.

Thank you for writing the book! I'm currently almost done with the first part (doing it in Haskell because why not) and every chapter I encounter situations where my "clever hack" turns out not to be so clever in the light of later requirements. It's been great fun so far. Have you considered writing up a follow-up book doing (say) a compiler or a JIT or something for Lox?

PS: the lexical analygator is the best and has shown up (with attributions of course) in several of the internal presentations at $WORK. At one point we even had fan art of him on the whiteboard, but it had to be sacrificed when we had a particularly large diagram to put on there. :|

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#125

Post by zengid »

grumpyprole wrote: post #43
alabhyajindal wrote: post #35

I really wish this book used something other than Java. Nothing against Java - just that I don't know it and don't feel excited about learning it.

When Java gets pattern matching, it will become a more reasonable choice to write an interpreter in.

+1. When I was following along in the book I wrote the interpeter in C#, and pattern matching allowed me to basically skip needing the code generator and the visitor pattern. YMMV but its great. Essentials of Compilation by Siek does a similar trick with python.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#126

Post by iftheshoefitss »

WJW wrote: post #124
munificent wrote: post #120

Author here. Seeing all of the positive comments about my book is really warming my heart. I appreciate everyone and I'm glad so many people have enjoyed the book. I put a ton of time and love into it and it's gratifying to see it had the effect I'd hoped for.

Thank you for writing the book! I'm currently almost done with the first part (doing it in Haskell because why not) and every chapter I encounter situations where my "clever hack" turns out not to be so clever in the light of later requirements. It's been great fun so far. Have you considered writing up a follow-up book doing (say) a compiler or a JIT or something for Lox? PS: the lexical analygator is the best and h…

[flagged]

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#127

Post by zengid »

I cherish this book, its fantastic. I love all of the tidbits about PL history in the margins, and its a great guide through the world of language design.

If you're looking for a follow up, I might have a recommendation. I recently got Essentials Of Compilation by Jeremy G. Siek, and I'm very excited to find some time to read it. There is a version implemented in python and racket (two separate books), so you can pick what you're more comfortable with. (I chose python). Its very elegantly written and after each chapter you end up with a working compiler.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#128

Post by eyelidlessness »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #109
eyelidlessness wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it the other way is a common pitfall in teaching programming concepts. A very common example is the historically necessary boilerplate in Java’s Hello World, where quite a few concepts are present but handwaved away as you don’t need to worry about this now . The problem with this is twofold: 1. It is challenging to distinguish the pertinent from the impertinent. People who are just starting won’t be able to te…

> Doing it the other way is a common pitfall in teaching programming concepts. 100% disagree If someone is brand new to programming and you're expecting to teach them the following concepts: A class, methods, static methods, data types, method return types, void return type, arrays, and namespaces just to be able to write a simple "Hello World" app [1] I think your approach is the one that's misguided. The most commo…

You say 100% disagree, but then everything you say seems to agree with my points. I would even go so far as to endorse your response as a longer form elaboration of exactly what I was trying to get across.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#129

Post by AQuantized »

munificent wrote: post #120

Author here. Seeing all of the positive comments about my book is really warming my heart. I appreciate everyone and I'm glad so many people have enjoyed the book. I put a ton of time and love into it and it's gratifying to see it had the effect I'd hoped for.

Game Programming Patterns is also excellent. There's something that feels quite 'honest' and straightforward about the style of both books. It sometimes seems like authors feel like they have to play along with the idea that it's all black magic, or maybe I'm just too stupid to understand GoF design patterns.

Re: Crafting Interpreters

#130

Post by fuzztester »

zengid wrote: post #127

I cherish this book, its fantastic. I love all of the tidbits about PL history in the margins, and its a great guide through the world of language design. If you're looking for a follow up, I might have a recommendation. I recently got Essentials Of Compilation by Jeremy G. Siek, and I'm very excited to find some time to read it. There is a version implemented in python and racket (two separate books), so you can pic…

I just checked it out.

apart from the book which you can buy, there is an open access edition, linked from the MIT press page, thanks to funding by Google, they say:

https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/Essentials-of-Compilatio... .

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