Reddit mentions of Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation

There's a great book that taught me tons and tons about programming, called Threaded Interpreted Languages: Their Design and Implementation by R.G. Loeliger. Basically he teaches you how Forth-like languages work, and step by step how to write your own interpreter from scratch. Understanding the central loop was for me a mind-bending exercise that kind of transformed how I thought about software. Definitely one of the best books I ever bought.

Here's the instructions

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-R-G-Loeliger/dp/007038360X

You can find it as a pdf online with google foo

I've updated the list, as I remembered Wirth's book and that got me a couple more hits. Chapter 8 of Watt's book is devoted to interpretation but the treatment is cursory, since the focus is on compilation.

I can't think from the top of my mind of any books dealing specifically with interpretation techniques for imperative languages. I can recommend some nice books on vaguely related techniques:

• Loeliger's delightful Threaded Interpretive Languages (Amazon link, but Google around) is specifically about Forth but is a good start for building threaded stack-based VMs (i.e., like for pre-JIT Java.) If threaded interpreters pique your interest, there are classic treatments available on the Web, especially Anton Ertl's work (PDF)
  
• Michael Gordon's Programming Language Theory and its Implementation (Amazon link, but Google around) covers interpreters for imperative, functional and logic languages, but his implementations are in Lisp of all languages.
  
• Kernighan and Pike's must-read The Unix Programming Environment (PDF) covers writing the interpreter for a little language by AST traversal in one of the latter chapters
  
  Hope this helps, as it is very much a mixed bag of recommendations.

Here's a neat little book if anyone is looking for a lot more details about writing one of these.

http://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design-Implementation/dp/007038360X

If you really want the kid to learn, all they need to do is [bootstrap their very own Forth on Z80 and learn to enjoy the pain power of Forth] (https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design-Implementation/dp/007038360X).

This book basically goes through the design and implementation of a complete Forth system in assembly language, complete with editor, compiler and assembler.