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Jumping Back and Forth · Crafting Interpreters

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The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose It’s taken a while to get here, but we’re finally ready to add control flow to our virtual machine. In the tree-walk interpreter we built for jlox, we implemented Lox’s control flow in terms of Java’s. To execute a Lox if statement, we used a Java if statement to run the chosen branch. That works, but isn’t entirely satisfying. By what magic does the JVM itself or a native CPU implement if statements? Now that we have our own bytecode VM to hack on, we can answer that. When we talk about “control flow”, what are we referring to? By “flow” we mean the way execution moves through the text of the program. Almost like there is a little robot inside the computer wandering through our code, executing bits and pieces here and there. Flow is the path that

23 Jumping Back and Forth The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose It's taken a while to get here, but we're finally ready to add control flow to our virtual machine. In the tree-walk interpreter we built for jlox, we implemented Lox's control flow in terms of Java's. To execute a Lox if statement, we used a Java if statement to run the chosen branch. That works, but isn't entirely satisfying. B

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