January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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Part 4
Interpreting Source Code
In this part, the first version of the complete interpreter comes together. I will work through the four different layers needed to handle the source code—lexing, parsing, analyzing, and generating—up to the point where the source code actually runs. By the end, I will make a concrete use of the language, just as a user of that language would.
This part has the following chapters:
- Chapter 13, Lexing: Turning Text into a Stream of Tokens
- Chapter 14, Parsing: Turning a Stream of Tokens into a Parse Tree
- Chapter 15, Analyzing: Turning a Parse Tree into an Abstract Syntax Tree
- Chapter 16, Generating: Turning an Abstract Syntax Tree into Instructions
- Chapter 17, Proving That It Works
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