December 2021
Beginner
840 pages
47h 29m
English
Content preview from Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation
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Chapter 4
Programming Language Implementation
So you are interpreters of interpreters?
—Socrates, Io
THE front end of a programming language implementation consists of a scanner and a parser. The output of the front end is typically an abstract-syntax tree. The actions performed on that abstract-syntax tree determine whether the language implementation is an interpreter or a compiler, or a combination of both—the topic of this chapter.