Introduction to Compiler Construction in a Java World

Chapter 3

Parsing

3.1 Introduction

Once we have identified the tokens in our program, we then want to determine its syntactic

structure. That is, we want to put the tokens together to make the larger syntactic entities:

expressions, statements, methods, and class definitions. This process of determining the

syntactic structure of a program is called parsing.

First, we wish to make sure the program is syntactically valid—that it conforms to the

grammar that describes its syntax. As the parser parses the program it should identify

syntax errors and report them and the line numbers they appear on. Moreover, when the

parser does find a syntax error, it should ...