There's a lot of mystique and prestige around the idea of compilers. It doesn't help that parsing is a fairly untidy, complex process. You're definitely right i

There's a lot of mystique and prestige around the idea of compilers. It doesn't help that parsing is a fairly untidy, complex process. You're definitely right in trying to present the overall functions in a much, much simpler way. My personal recommendation in this field is nanopass compiler architecture. It's a more manageable approach to the task of implementing a compiler, through the use of lots of incremental passes rather than a few heroic ones. http://andykeep.com/pubs/np-preprint.pdf http://andykeep.com/pubs/np-preprint.pdf NB "When a paper on the first nanopass framework was accepted for ICFP 2004, however, the program committee required the authors to refocus the paper on education because they did not believe the nanopass methodology was suitable for commercial compilers. They were principally concerned with the compile-time overhead of repeated traversals. This concern was impossible to refute at the time because the prototype infrastructure and implementation were not mature enough to put to the test."