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Table Of Contents
Building Programming Language Interpreters
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In addition to the distinction between the values and the variables, different types of values can be assigned to those variables. Some represent something straightforward, such as a number. Others represent how other values are stored and accessed. These are called containers.
This distinction is a lot more important in languages such as C++, where there is a lot of control over the life cycle of values. In contrast, it’s a lot simpler when the only concern is efficiently accessing the values inside the container. Nevertheless, regardless of the type of language, the role of the container is to provide an efficient way of handling common use cases.
There is also a distinction regarding how much the user of the language is expected to construct their containers versus how much the language itself provides the features for most use cases. Contrasting Python and C++ is, again, an interesting way of demonstrating the different approaches language...