LCC is intended to be simple to understand and is well-documented; its design is described in Fraser and Hanson's book "A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation". The book includes most of the source code for version 3.6 of the compiler, which was written as a literate program using noweb. As of July 2011 the current version of LCC is 4.2, but much of the book still applies to this version. The major change since the book was published is in the code-generator interface, which is described in a separate document.