Compiling Lisp
Many textbooks show simple interpreters for Lisp, because they are simple to write, and because it is useful to know how an interpreter works. Unfortunately, not as many textbooks show how to write a compiler, even though the same two reasons hold. The simplest compiler need not be much more complex than an interpreter.
One thing that makes a compiler more complex is that we have to describe the output of the compiler: the instruction set of the machine we are compiling for. For the moment let's assume a stack-based machine. The calling sequence on this machine for a function call with n arguments is to push the n arguments onto the stack and then push the function to be called. A “CALL n” instruction saves the return point ...
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