Comment by rwmj
3 years ago
C has a bit of a history with interpreters and reduced implementations (not to devalue SectorC which is absolutely cool). I'm thinking Small C Interpreter for CP/M: http://www.cpm.z80.de/small_c.html an interpreted version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C
The book that had the Cain/Hendrix "Small C" compiler, runtime library, assembler and tools was a fantastic resource that taught me C and compiler construction at the same time.
In general, reading (lots of) source code is a good way to learn how to do things in a new language, i.e. to move from the lexical and syntactical level to the level of idioms for problem-solving. On reflection, I find it strange that in programming teaching, larger pieces of existing well-written source code are never discussed/explained/critiqued.
Small C was the inspiration for SubC, a project of mine. It is pretty much a cleaned-up and slightly extended rewrite of Small C that compiles with few warnings on modern compilers. Also comes with a book.
http://t3x.org/subc/index.html (source code)
http://t3x.org/reload/index.html (book)