Let’s Build A Simple Interpreter

http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/

Why would you study interpreters and compilers? I will give you three reasons.

1. To write an interpreter or a compiler you have to have a lot of technical skills that you need to use together. Writing an interpreter or a compiler will help you improve those skills and become a better software developer. As well, the skills you will learn are useful in writing any software, not just interpreters or compilers.
2. You really want to know how computers work. Often interpreters and compilers look like magic. And you shouldn’t be comfortable with that magic. You want to demystify the process of building an interpreter and a compiler, understand how they work, and get in control of things.
3. You want to create your own programming language or domain specific language. If you create one, you will also need to create either an interpreter or a compiler for it. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in new programming languages. And you can see a new programming language pop up almost every day: Elixir, Go, Rust just to name a few.

if a translator translates a source program into machine language, it is a compiler. If a translator processes and executes the source program without translating it into machine language first, it is an interpreter.