I decided to make my college thesis on creating a BASIC interpreter in D for scripting, command line, and other purposes. However, I have an issue with finding resources, meaning that I couldn't work on it yet since I cannot cite anything.

Can anyone help me? It doesn't need to be for D since I understand many other programming languages (and I bet there's a massive lack of literature about D), but I do have budget restrictions, so I cannot buy expensive books. Also I would like to have something also on BASIC.

On Thursday, 6 June 2019 at 19:38:25 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> I decided to make my college thesis on creating a BASIC interpreter in D for scripting, command line, and other purposes. However, I have an issue with finding resources, meaning that I couldn't work on it yet since I cannot cite anything.
>
> Can anyone help me? It doesn't need to be for D since I understand many other programming languages (and I bet there's a massive lack of literature about D), but I do have budget restrictions, so I cannot buy expensive books. Also I would like to have something also on BASIC.

If you want a book on D programming, Ali and Andrei's books are the goto resources. I would not interpret BASIC, but that's up to you.

https://craftinginterpreters.com/ is good, and also any compiler textbook will be fine for building an AST.

On Thursday, 6 June 2019 at 22:27:14 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 June 2019 at 19:38:25 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
>> [...]
>
> If you want a book on D programming, Ali and Andrei's books are the goto resources. I would not interpret BASIC, but that's up to you.
>
> https://craftinginterpreters.com/ is good, and also any compiler textbook will be fine for building an AST.

*parsing and building an AST

On Thursday, 6 June 2019 at 19:38:25 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> I decided to make my college thesis on creating a BASIC interpreter in D for scripting, command line, and other purposes. However, I have an issue with finding resources, meaning that I couldn't work on it yet since I cannot cite anything.
>
> Can anyone help me? It doesn't need to be for D since I understand many other programming languages (and I bet there's a massive lack of literature about D), but I do have budget restrictions, so I cannot buy expensive books. Also I would like to have something also on BASIC.

I have collected a few links I liked about interpreters.

This tutorial explains how to build a lisp in Javascript. The author first uses
a simple approach and then revisit in several passes to optimize or make some
construct possible (like continuations and exceptions):
http://lisperator.net/pltut/

This paper explains how to build an interpreter using closures. This is a
trade-off between the simplicity of an AST based interpreter and performance
close to "threaded" code (the program are made of successif call to native
library functions):
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/FeeleyLapalmeCL87.pdf

This article is a simple explanation of the fundamental principles of a
bytecode interpreter / virtual machine:
https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/bytecode-interpreters/

From the same author of https://craftinginterpreters.com/:
- An article about inventing a precise garbage collector:
  http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-garbage-collector/

- The Wren language. Its source code is highly readable, of a reasonable size
  and with good explanations on what's going on:
  https://github.com/wren-lang/wren

This articles describe a CESK machine, in a mathematical way. There is a link
to some working Racket code at the end. The bottom of the page contains links
to subject related to programming language implementation methods:
http://matt.might.net/articles/cesk-machines/

Half of those links are using a variant lisp, as its simplicity can help
describe concepts in a concise form. The principles can then be applied in
another programming language.

On Thursday, 6 June 2019 at 19:38:25 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> I decided to make my college thesis on creating a BASIC interpreter in D for scripting, command line, and other purposes. However, I have an issue with finding resources, meaning that I couldn't work on it yet since I cannot cite anything.
>
> Can anyone help me? It doesn't need to be for D since I understand many other programming languages (and I bet there's a massive lack of literature about D), but I do have budget restrictions, so I cannot buy expensive books. Also I would like to have something also on BASIC.

Found in an AWESOME list : https://www.amazon.com/dp/1852339691
(https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers#books), there are more in the book section, I see a few ones dedicated specifically to VMs

Is there any write-up or talk about the Javascript interpreter Walter Bright wrote? Was it written in @nogc D by any chance?

On Sunday, 16 June 2019 at 20:28:49 UTC, Yatheendra wrote:
> Is there any write-up or talk about the Javascript interpreter Walter Bright wrote?

There was this in 2013 : https://dconf.org/2013/talks/chevalier_boisvert.html, not Digital Mars ECMA but Higgs, a JS VM.

> Was it written in @nogc D by any chance?

@nogc attribute didn't exist at that time.

On Sunday, 16 June 2019 at 20:37:21 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
>
> There was this in 2013 : https://dconf.org/2013/talks/chevalier_boisvert.html, not Digital Mars ECMA but Higgs, a JS VM.
>
>> Was it written in @nogc D by any chance?
>
> @nogc attribute didn't exist at that time.

Thanks for the information.