Having been following the progress of Crafting Interpreters as it’s been posted, it was interesting to read Bob Nystrom’s rather personal blog post about his actual process as a writer working on it. It’s interesting that he mentioned static types - and the clarity they offer to the programmer about what is going on in code - as one of the motivating factors for using Java (and later C) as implementation languages for his interpreters. I do wish that the toy language that Crafting Interpreters guides you through had some kind of static typing. Seeing a detailed breakdown of the process of writing a type checking system, in the style of the the rest of the book, would be very interesting to me.
Static typing is typically in compilers. There’s no rule against having it in interpreters, though. One could do a pass for type-checking before running a program or module.
So now, after Thorsten Ball, one more person to be envious of :) Well done Bob!
Having been following the progress of Crafting Interpreters as it’s been posted, it was interesting to read Bob Nystrom’s rather personal blog post about his actual process as a writer working on it. It’s interesting that he mentioned static types - and the clarity they offer to the programmer about what is going on in code - as one of the motivating factors for using Java (and later C) as implementation languages for his interpreters. I do wish that the toy language that Crafting Interpreters guides you through had some kind of static typing. Seeing a detailed breakdown of the process of writing a type checking system, in the style of the the rest of the book, would be very interesting to me.
I wish too there would be static typing in it, but probably this is incompatible with his goal:
Static typing is typically in compilers. There’s no rule against having it in interpreters, though. One could do a pass for type-checking before running a program or module.
I think he meant the ‘small’ goal rather than the ‘interpreter’ ;)
Oh darn. My bad haha.
I’ve been following this book for a while. I’m really looking forward to the print edition.
Also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who checks for letter discrepancies in hand-written-looking fonts :)
But is it Turing complete?
…
I’ll see myself out.