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The second thing I did after finding out about FORTH (after boggling for a bit and trying to figure out how the heck it worked without function arguments) was to go and design a stack-based language and implement an interactive interpreter for it in JavaScript. Largely just because I realized FORTH is so simple, I actually could do it.

Then my language design aspirations languished for about 10 years until I had a Discrete Mathematics class based around writing a parser and interpreter for Datalog (subset of Prolog).

Then there was the programming language design class where we implemented interpreters for various language features in Racket, but by then I forgot most of how to write parsers and (read) takes care of most of the hard part there. It certainly would've been more fun if we'd had to design our languages, rather than just implementing predefined ones.

And several computer architecture & an operating systems class that dealt with "this is what C code gets turned into", but no details on the actual process of doing the translation.

So, I guess this kind of thing has been fairly well represented in my formal education, but not very well integrated. Just disjointed bits and pieces as they're relevant for some other subject. It'd definitely be nice if they were more coherent earlier on, before tackling Compilers head on.




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