What exactly is a parser?
A parser is a program module that scans an input file, a script file, for example, and decomposes it into its constituent parts and then processes the parts in some suitable manner. The XIDEK kit contains just three baseline parsers for each of the two baseline languages it implements, since the ast parser is shared by both the astxi and astci baseline interpreters: • dxi: performs the operations indicated by the script as the script is parsed. • dci: creates bytecode that can carry out the operations indicated by the script. • ast: creates an abstract syntax tree, that is, a tree representation of the operations indicated by the script. Other modules can then walk the tree in order to perform the operations or compile code. A diagram illustrating the relationship of these three parsers to the four interpreter architectures is available here .
