Since we’re in full compiler-compiler season I thought it would be appropriate for me to also provide a more educational example. This example illustrates how a very rudimentary* compiler works. In more detail, it shows what happens to your code after it’s been chopped into nice tokens. Then, it shows how, based on these tokens and the language’s grammar an AST is built and then decorated and, finally, how this tree is fed to an interpreter and results start popping up.

By rudimentary I mean that the language consists of simple arithmetic expressions. Below, you can find the compiler-demo. Just type stuff and be amazed!

If you want to find out more about the inner workings of this nifty thing, check this very nicely written article on CodeProject.

<div> Your input code:
7 + pi * (x - 10)
The environment:
{ “x” : 5, “pi” : 3 }
Output:
</div>