C4 – C in 4 functions

This is not how you code when you work in a team or when you know some other poor soul has to come along and maintain it.

I suggest you take a look at [1] then go and read this excellent book by Martin Fowler: "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell

[2] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44936.Refactoring

The functions may be big, but they also don't have all that much duplicate code inside them. The choice of 4 functions isn't arbitrary either - they nicely divide the problem into:

- next() - splits the source code into a series of tokens

- expr() - parses expressions

- stmt() - parses statements

- main() - starts the processing of the source, and also contains the main interpreter VM's execution loop

Code generation is integrated into the parsing, since it's generating code for a stack-based machine and that also very nicely follows the sequence of actions performed when parsing.

In fact I'm of the opinion that the obsession with breaking up code into tiny pieces (usually accompanied by the overuse of OOP) is harmful to the understanding of the program as a whole since it encourages looking at each piece independently and misses "seeing the forest for the trees".

In contrast, this is code that is designed to be easily read and understood by a single person, showing how very simple an entire compiler and interpreter/VM can be. It doesn't attempt to hide anything with thick layers upon layers of abstraction and deep chains of function calls, but instead is the "naked essence" of the solution to the problem.

Someone used to e.g. enterprise Java may find this style of code quite jarring to their senses, but that's only because they've grown accustomed to an environment in which everything is highly-abstracted and indirect, hiding the true nature of the solution. Personally, I think the simplicity and "nakedness" of this code has a great beauty to it --- it's a functional work of art.