Comment by pjmlp
5 days ago
It was a product of its time I guess, much better ones from similar vintage,
The Tiger book (with C, Standard ML, and Java variants)
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/
Compiler Design in C (freely available nowadays, beware this is between K&R C and C89)
lcc, A Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C
Or if one wants to go with more clever stuff,
Compiling with Continuations
Lisp in Small Pieces
Another vote for Lisp in Small Pieces. Great high level compiler book that teaches you how to build a Lisp and doesn’t get bogged down in lexing and parsing.
Instead of Lisp in Small Pieces I'd recommend SICP instead. No continuation passing, but much better written.
And no information on how to actually do a compiler, end to end, only a self hosted interpreter.
The authors don't have the same audience in mind.
I would recommend both, one is about actual Lisp compilers, the other alternative computation models.