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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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Following our discussion in the previous chapter, I want to dive a little bit beyond the basic abstraction to the specific concrete aspect of how programming languages work. In particular, I want to focus on the smallest unit of work for any execution environment: the instruction.The boundary of an instruction is very easy to identify in the instruction set architecture for a particular hardware platform. The specific implementations of an instruction are abstracted away and the microcode will decode that instruction into an implementation-defined set of microinstructions, in what appears to any external observer as a single step.Conceptualizing the instruction as a single step is a very useful abstraction that allows the hardware designer to evolve the microarchitecture without being bound to specific choices made on previous iterations of the hardware.Likewise, in the C++ language, those instructions are defined in terms of particular operations...
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