Is a book that teaches how to build compilers good for learning to implement interpreters?

Question

I'm looking for a book to learn how to implement interpreters for programming languages. Thing is there are much more 'compiler books' than 'interpreter books'. So my question is: can I read a book that teaches how to build compilers, to learn how to build interpreters (at a very beginner level)? Is this a good idea? If so, what do I need to keep in mind while reading?

Answer 1

Absolutely - an interpreter is just a "one line at a time" compiler. It performs much the same task, that of taking some form of human-understandable source code and turning it into something a computer processor can understand. A compiler will do this for entire source file(s), whereas an interpreter will do this on an as-read basis.

You will need to handle a few differences around loading source as needed, and handling parsing source files to find the next line to read, but otherwise you'll be implementing a compiler fundamentally.

Answer 2

Is a book that teaches how to build compilers good for learning to implement interpreters?

Yes - A good book on compilers will cover a wide range of topics, many of which are directly relevant to interpreters / interpreted languages. For example:

• lexical analysis
• parsing
• creation of an AST
• type checking, identifier resolution and other kinds of semantic analysis
• "compiler" error reporting
• possibly ... generation of an abstract machine code that the interpreter will "execute".

If so, what do I need to keep in mind while reading?

Keep in mind that some of the material in the book may not be that relevant. For example, a typical abstract machine is register-less, so the sections of the book on register allocation during code generation are typically not relevant to an interpreter.

(But that's just common sense. You wouldn't normally read a book like that from cover to cover. You'd typically skim the bits that don't seem relevant to your goals.)