Abstract Syntactic: the structure of described independent of its representation or encoding
Abstract Syntax Tree: A tree representation of a abstract syntactic written in a formal language. A node within this tree represents a syntactical construct within the text.
- Variable types preserved
- Location of each deceleration in source code
- Order of executable statements represented explicitly and well defined
- Left and right components must be stored
- Identifiers and assigned values stored for assignments
- Arbitrarily large amount of children?
- Flexible enough to account for unknown children
- Able to unparse an AST into source code
- Represent structure of a program
- result of syntax analysis phase of a compiler
- Contains extra information about the program due to consecutive stages of analysis by the compiler
- position of each element in source code
- enforcing language requires context
- semantic analysis
- symbol tables based on AST
- allows for program verification