Parsers

Parsers are a key component in programming languages. They are what turn the raw text characters into something the interpreter or compiler understands. This subwiki is all about understanding them. As I write this, I am a complete beginner, to so this is a record of my progress.

Tokenisers and Parsers

We generally parse in two stages: first we tokenise the input by turning it into tokens. That is, we go from

the cat sat on the mat

to

(symbol,'the') (whitespace,' ') (symbol,'cat')...

SimpleTokeniserInPython1 SimpleTokeniserInPython2