Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I followed this in the early 90s and had a lovely time. It helped that Turbo Pascal was my language of choice though and might not be quite so helpful now although Pascal is a pretty good pseudocode..

It's not the same but Vidar Hokstad has been writing a series for several years now in Ruby: http://www.hokstad.com/compiler/ .. and other resources aplenty: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1672/3951

View on HN

Thanks for the mention... I'll be pushing out the next part in a couple of days. And I'm just wrapping up a part on register allocation.

The really great part with the Crenshaw tutorial, is that it's so cohesive and concise. It's reminiscent of Wirths compiler construction texts, but much simpler to follow.

Me to! What a blast to the past. I might look through it again.

> Pascal is a pretty good pseudocode..

Pascal is pretty much directly derived from early dialects of Algol, which is where most modern programming language syntaxes derive; it's the original block-structured syntax, as opposed to line-structured assembly and early FORTRAN and the fully-bracketed Lisp syntax (which is also block-structured if you indent it sanely).

And the reason Pascal is pretty much directly derived from Algol is that Wirth was on the Algol committee, and kept trying to get it simplified and tightened up. He then eventually went on to do Euler and Pascal (and of course later Modula and Oberon) to implement the ideas he'd had for Algol.

This is quite interesting: Pascal and its Successors - Niklaus Wirth http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php

Reply on news.ycombinator.com