Teaser

We explore the concepts of language, interpreters, compilers, and hardware architecture by building a simple pocket calculator.

These are the components that make up our calculator:

• An arithmetic language embedded into Haskell.
• Language interpreters to work out the value of an expression and pretty print it.
• A virtual stack machine to simulate the calculator hardware.
• A compiler to transform language expressions into low-level instructions the machine can run.

Even though this is just a toy, it should give us a fairly good idea of how to conceptualise the problem and design a solution.