January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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11
Execution Frames, the Stack, and Continuations
In the previous chapter, I started the process of implementing the interpreter’s stack machine. However, that implementation is not yet capable of handling control flow operations, such as conditionals or functions. In this chapter, I will add those capabilities, as well as discuss how the interpreter needs to manage the execution across multiple continuations.
More specifically, this chapter will work through the following:
- How an operation tree needs to be treated as a value in order to allow redirecting the execution
- The way in which the interpreter dynamically chooses what to invoke
- How a function is made by a sequence of operations, control flow, and variable scopes
- How the interpreter ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.