January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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8
Lexical Scopes
Variables and values exist in different scopes, and different programming languages make different choices on which types of scopes are available to the user. In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- Introduce the concept of the lexical pad
- How different languages define the scope of names inside a given function
- The flexibility and complexity added by supporting block lexical scopes
- The lexical scope defined by a closure
- The way different languages handle names with a global scope and how it affects code reuse
By the end of this chapter, you will have a more nuanced understanding of how languages handle resolving names from various different scopes, and how that affects code reuse in those languages.
The lexical pad ...
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