January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
372 pages
8h 14m
English
Content preview from Building Programming Language Interpreters
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15
Analyzing: Turning a Parse Tree into an Abstract Syntax Tree
The parse tree doesn’t necessarily present itself in a way that makes it easy to process what the code is meant to do. Oftentimes, it contains redundant information or is organized in a way that is focused on allowing the grammar to be specified in a non-ambiguous way. Therefore, before we generate actual instructions, we need to transform the parse tree into a data structure that better represents the semantics of the language.
In this chapter, I will focus on the process of producing a representation of the code that represents the semantics of the execution of the code, even if it doesn’t yet correspond to the actual interpreter operations. This will include the following:
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