A tribute to this great article series by Jack W. Crenshaw...


Crenshaw himself
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Expression parsing
Chapter 3 More Expressions
Chapter 4 Interpreters
Chapter 5 Control Constructs
Chapter 6 Boolean Expressions
Chapter 7 Lexical Scanning
Chapter 8 A Little Philosophy
Chapter 9 A Top View
Chapter 10 Introducing "Tiny"
Chapter 11 Lexical Scan Revisited
Chapter 12 Miscellany
Chapter 13 Procedures
Chapter 14 Types
Chapter 15 Back to the Future
Chapter 16 Unit Construction
Chapter 17 2006 Forth wrapup

Comments on the Web Edition

Jack W. Crenshaw wrote the Let's Build a Compiler article series from 1988 - 1995. This document is a formatted version of that excellent non-technical introduction to compiler construction. These web pages were created in 2005, and port Mr. Crenshaw's original Pascal code for the 68000 under SK*OS to the Forth language on a 80x86 CPU, under Windows XP.

The text files were downloaded from http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/. They are highly recommended.

In this transcript I have assumed a 32-bit, byte-addressing Forth, with 8-bit characters. Division is symmetric, not floored, and two's complement is assumed throughout. iForth works splendidly for it, but other Forths can do it too.


Comments appreciated: c/o Marcel Hendrix - mhx@iae.nl
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