Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by Avshalom on Saturday April 29, 2023 @08:48AM
(#35752395)
That criticism seems pretty tangential to BYOL's stated goal of learning C.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Contents • Build Your Own Lisp
by hayley-patton on Saturday April 29, 2023 @09:01AM
(#35752484)
"C programs crashing is a fact of life. If anything goes wrong the operating system kicks them out" is _very_ bad advice for someone learning C. The introduction reads
> This book is for anyone wanting to learn C, or who has once wondered how to build their own programming language.
which I interpret as having "design a language" as another goal. Arguably the book succeeds at building a programming language, but it mangles the theory in unhelpful ways, e.g. lexical scoping isn't a static analysis per chapter 16, nor is parsing the consumption of an abstract syntax tree per chapter 10.