A practical guide to writing interpreters and compilers. Shows how to write a series of useful utilities, including an interactive debugging interpreter and a working compiler, in a top-down, incremental fashion. Hands-on approach encourages experimentation with these programs on a personal computer. Presentation is independent of operating system and compiler writing system. All the programs are written in the C language. Includes exercises.

From the Back Cover

Quickly master all the skills you need to build your own compilers and interpreters in C++

Whether you are a professional programmer who needs to write a compiler at work or a personal programmer who wants to write an interpreter for a language of your own invention, this book quickly gets you up and running with all the knowledge and skills you need to do it right. It cuts right to the chase with a series of skill-building exercises ranging in complexity from the basics of reading a program to advanced object-oriented techniques for building a compiler in C++.

Here's how it works:

Every chapter contains anywhere from one to three working utility programs that provide a firsthand demonstration of concepts discussed, and each chapter builds upon the preceding ones. You begin by learning how to read a program and produce a listing, deconstruct a program into tokens (scanning), and how to analyze it based on its syntax (parsing). From there, Ron Mak shows you step by step how to build an actual working interpreter and an interactive debugger. Once you've mastered those skills, you're ready to apply them to building a compiler that runs on virtually any desktop computer.

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