Building A Toy Language Interpreter in Go
In this post, I'll be giving a high-level overview of interpreters, why they're interesting, and how they work. I'll be referencing my repo, go_interpreter , which is a simple interpreter written in Go for a toy language. The figure below shows the structure of our interpreter with an example input: What is an interpreter? An interpreter is a language processor that seems to directly execute the source program on user input: In contrast, a compiler first takes in a source program and translates it to an executable machine code target program. Then, the user can pass in inputs to this target program and get outputs. In general, an interpreter is better at reporting errors since it's processing statements one at a time, and a compiler is faster at generating outputs from inputs. In this post, we're going to go over a simple interpreter that is capable of supporting: integers, booleans, strings, arrays, hashmaps prefix, infix operators index opera...
