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Stefan Alfbo
Stefan Alfbo

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Chapter 3 of Crafting Interpreters

Finished chapter 3 today of the Crafting Interpreters book, which is also the last chapter of part one of the book.

This chapter goes through the properties of the language Lox that will be implemented in this book.

It will use dynamic typing to make the book concise since a static type system includes a lot of things to learn. The language has a lot of similarities with JavaScript (at least from a helicopter view), however it will not use prototypes, instead it will use classes. The author has a small section about classes vs prototypes which I found interesting.

The chapter pointed to an interesting paper that will be on my reading list:

Peter J. Landin coined the term “closure”. Yes, he invented damn near half the terms in programming languages. Most of them came out of one incredible paper, “The Next 700 Programming Languages”.

and this post, Waterbed Theory, by Larry Wall.

Next up is part two and chapter 4 about scanners.

My previous post about the book is here.

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