January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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14
Parsing: Turning a Stream of Tokens into a Parse Tree
The sequence of tokens produced by the tokenizer is easier to work with than the raw text, but if you were to try and convert those tokens directly into operations, you’d find yourself struggling a lot. The reason for that is that most programming languages have a hierarchy of how the code is represented, and in order to understand the code, we need it to be represented at a higher level of abstraction.
In this chapter, I will focus on the process of converting a sequence of tokens into a parse tree, which is the name we give to the data structure representing how the code needs to be read. To do that, we will do the following:
- Identify what data structures we need to represent the code ...
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