CHAPTER 4
Syntax Analysis
This chapter is devoted to parsing methods that are typically used in compilers. We first present the basic concepts, then techniques suitable for hand implementation, and finally algorithms that have been used in automated tools. Since programs may contain syntactic errors, we discuss extensions of the parsing methods for recovery from common errors.
By design, every programming language has precise rules that prescribe the syntactic structure of well-formed programs. In C, for example, a program is made up of functions, a function out of declarations and statements, a statement out of expressions, and so on. The syntax of programming language constructs can be specified by context-free grammars or BNF (Backus-Naur ...
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