Computing Dictionary
parser definition
language An
algorithm or program to determine the syntactic structure of ("parse") a
sentence or string of symbols in some language. A parser normally takes as input a sequence of
tokens output by a
lexical analyser. It may produce some kind of
abstract syntax tree as output. A parser may be produced automatically from a grammar by a
parser generators such as
yacc.
A parser is normally part of some larger program, like a
compiler, which takes the output of the parser and attempts to extract meaning from it in some way, e.g. translating it into another language.
(2009-06-26)