[nzentzis]

I think I partially agree, but that it mainly depends on the audience. I've found that parsing and recursion appear in more areas than just compilers, to the point where it'd be relatively difficult to avoid them. Machine code generation and the underlying implementation of high-level primitives (closures, tail-call recursion, and the like) hasn't, at least in my experience, been "naturally-occurring" to the same extent.

In terms of creating a "learn compilers from scratch" resource, Crenshaw's approach is definitely better. The trade-off would be that it'd take longer to get past the "writing a recursive descent/LR parser" phase, and it might never get to higher-level language features at all depending on the input language you go with.

[phouchg]

I've worked my way through quite a few tutorials on implementing Scheme I think you're absolutely correct that detailed material on implementing high level features, especially in machine code, is lacking. I'm very grateful for this tutorial. Can't wait for the next part!