Overview: Compilers and Interpreters

Content covering compiler and interpreter theory as computer science concepts, with concrete implementations in real languages.

Terminology

Before diving into a series, the Terminology page defines all key terms — token, lexeme, parser, AST, compiler, interpreter, closure, lexical scope, tail call, TCO, and more — with precise definitions sourced from the Dragon Book, SICP, R5RS, and McCarthy's original 1960 paper.

Series

Building a Lisp Interpreter in F#

A multi-part series building a Scheme dialect interpreter from scratch using F#. The series treats the interpreter as a vehicle for understanding core CS theory — lexical analysis, parsing, the environment model, closures, and tail-call optimization — not as an F# cookbook.

Dialect: Scheme (R5RS subset) Parts: 6 core parts (Part 7 macros: planned) Prerequisites: Familiarity with any programming language; F# syntax exposure helpful but not required

Part	Topic	CS Concepts
1	The Shape of Lisp	Formal language structure, homoiconicity, REPL model
2	Tokenizing and Reading	Lexical analysis, context-free grammars, recursive descent
3	Environments and Evaluation	Environment model, eval/apply, substitution vs environment
4	Special Forms and Closures	First-class functions, closures, lexical scope, free variables
5	Derived Forms and the REPL	Syntactic sugar, macro expansion as transformation
6	Tail-Call Optimization	Tail position, TCO, trampolining, continuation-passing style

Adding New Content

New series or articles go in a subdirectory named for the concept (not the implementation language). The implementation language belongs in the article title and frontmatter tags, not the directory name.

• compilers-and-interpreters/<concept-name>/ — for multi-part series
• compilers-and-interpreters/<concept-name>.md — for standalone articles