I don't know if it's that important as Pascal is pretty straight forward. I was able to follow along[1] and translate Pascal to Ruby on the fly even though I do

I don't know if it's that important as Pascal is pretty straight forward. I was able to follow along[1] and translate Pascal to Ruby on the fly even though I don't really know any Pascal. I certainly understand the resulting Pascal-ish language. I have a feeling that most people with the will to read a tutorial on compilers, and actually make it through the first chapter, are smart enough and work hard enough to figure it out. [1] In case anyone's interested: http://github.com/samsonjs/compiler http://github.com/samsonjs/compiler instead of emitting assembly instructions it emits x86 machine code directly.