Language Implementation Patterns

The Big Picture

Language applications can be very complicated beasts, so we need to break them down into bite-sized components. The components fit together into a multistage pipeline that analyzes or manipulates an input stream. The pipeline gradually converts an input sentence (valid input sequence) to a handy internal data structure or translates it to a sentence in another language.

We can see the overall data flow within the pipeline in Figure 1, ​The multistage pipeline of a language application​. The basic idea is that a reader recognizes input and builds an intermediate representation (IR) that feeds the rest of the application. At the opposite end, a generator emits output based upon the IR and what the application learned in the intermediate ...