January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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16
Generating: Turning an Abstract Syntax Tree into Instructions
While the abstract syntax tree (AST) is now much closer to the semantics of the execution of the code from the programming language, it still does not represent actual executable instructions. The interpreter only knows how to process an operation tree, and we have now finally gotten to the point where we will complete the loop, all the way from source code to the executable instructions.
In this chapter, I will focus on the challenges and the practical approach involved in the transformation of the AST into the operations the interpreter can run. The following topics will be covered:
- Traversing AST nodes and transforming them into an operation tree, including identifying and ...
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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.