Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

3.3 Parsing

Parsing (or syntactic analysis) is the process of determining whether a string is a sentence (in some language) and, if so, (typically) converting the concrete representation of it into an abstract representation, which generally facilitates the intended subsequent processing of it. A concrete-syntax representation of a program is typically a string (or a parse tree as shown in Chapter 2, where the terminals along the fringe of the tree from left-to-right constitute the input string). Since a program in concrete syntax is not readily processable, it must be parsed into an abstract representation, where the details of the concrete-syntax representation that are irrelevant to the subsequent processing are abstracted away. A parse tree ...