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An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code ) written in a formal language .
A parse tree is similar to an abstract syntax tree but it will typically also contain features such as parentheses, which are syntactically significant but which are implicit in the structure of the abstract syntax tree. Algebraic data types are particularly well-suited to the implementation of abstract syntax. [5]
In computer science, a tree is a widely used abstract data type that represents a hierarchical tree structure with a set of connected nodes. Each node in the tree can be connected to many children (depending on the type of tree), but must be connected to exactly one parent, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] except for the root node, which has no parent (i.e., the ...
An abstract semantic graph is typically constructed from an abstract syntax tree by a process of enrichment and abstraction. The enrichment can for example be the addition of back-pointers , edges from an identifier node (where a variable is being used) to a node representing the declaration of that variable.
The parsing stage itself can be divided into two parts: the parse tree, or "concrete syntax tree", which is determined by the grammar, but is generally far too detailed for practical use, and the abstract syntax tree (AST), which simplifies this into a usable form. The AST and contextual analysis steps can be considered a form of semantic ...
An abstract syntax is abstract because it is represented by mathematical objects that have certain structure by their very nature. For instance, in first-order abstract syntax (FOAS) trees, as commonly used in compilers, the tree structure implies the subexpression relation, meaning that no parentheses are required to disambiguate programs (as they are, in the concrete syntax).
This hierarchy can also be seen as a tree: This tree is called a parse tree or "concrete syntax tree" of the string, by contrast with the abstract syntax tree. In this case the presented leftmost and the rightmost derivations define the same parse tree; however, there is another rightmost derivation of the same string S
In the spectrum between interpreting and compiling, another approach is to transform the source code into an optimized abstract syntax tree (AST), then execute the program following this tree structure, or use it to generate native code just-in-time. [12] In this approach, each sentence needs to be parsed just once.