January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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12
Running and Testing Language Operators
In the past few chapters, I have explored different aspects of the runtime for the interpreter, from the execution model to how it interacts with I/O operations and native callbacks. There was a hint, particularly in the previous chapter, of the importance of designing the operators for the interpreter.
In this chapter, I will now focus on getting enough operations in place for the interpreter to be able to execute a more complete program. We will work through the following:
- Identifying the main flow of the program
- The operators we need and the data structures they manipulate
- Building the tests for the target use case
- Putting it all together into the real execution
By the end of this chapter, you will ...
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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.