Improving on his last post about creating a bytecode compiler in PHP, the Sankuru blog has a new post in the series looking at extending the basic compiler to add support for if/while and do while logic.

In order to obtain a turing-complete programming language, that is, a language in which we can implement and execute any arbitrary algorithm, that is, that other turing-complete machines can execute too, we now need to add a way of (conditionally) branching, that is, the IF statement, and at least one way of repeating statements, that is the WHILE or the DO WHILE statements.

He includes a simple TL-based script as an end goal for the compiler to be able to execute and shows how to add rules for it to the lexer/parser. Rules for the "if" are relatively simple, but there's a hitch in dealing with embedded "while" statements he had to work around. The post ends with the bytecode results for the sample program and the resulting output from the compiled versions execution.