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Re:My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021) by zabzonk on Saturday March 25, 2023 @09:04PM (#35309464)
perhaps you had no motivation for writing an interpreter? almost all programming tasks that are of any interest require you to have some special problem to solve.

i really don't know how to describe this, but if you have no specific goal, you are not going to do, or learn how to do, anything. why do you deeply, deeply want to learn how to write an interpreter? what problem will writing an interpreter solve for you?

Re:My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021) by green_man_lives on Sunday March 26, 2023 @11:45AM (#35315712)
Nothing in particular other than knowledge that I can use across domains. I don't want to know how to write an interpreter per se, but I want to understand the steps from text to machine code.

I think it has already yielded benefits in my better understanding of environments and lexical scoping, grammars + LALR. It has just given me different conceptual tools that I can use to learn new concepts.

A concrete example was that I was playing around with a recursive prompt with ChatGPT the other day trying to figure out if I could get it to write a more specific version of a prompt I had given it and sort of bootstrap its way to a very specialized "train-of-thought". I was thinking about grammars and how recursive prompting is sort of like a meta-grammar. It's just a new way of thinking about things.