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What Is The Role of The Lexical Analyzer in Compiler Design

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36 views2 pages

What Is The Role of The Lexical Analyzer in Compiler Design

Jntuh pdf

Uploaded by

Sony Sonar
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What is the role of the lexical analyzer in compiler design?

Com pile r De sign Program m ing Language s Com pute r Program m ing

The lexical analysis is the first phase of the compiler where a lexical analyser operate as an interf ace
between the source code and the rest of the phases of a compiler. It reads the input characters of the
source program, groups them into lexemes, and produces a sequence of tokens f or each lexeme. The
tokens are sent to the parser f or syntax analysis.

If the lexical analyzer is located as a separate pass in the compiler it can need an intermediate file to
locate its output, f rom which the parser would then takes its input. It can eliminate the need f or the
intermediate file, the lexical analyzer and the syntactic analyser (parser) are of ten grouped into the
same pass where the lexical analyser operates either under the control of the parser or as a subroutine
with the parser.

The lexical analyzer also interacts with the symbol table while passing tokens to the parser. Whenever a
token is discovered, the lexical analyzer returns a representation f or that token to the parser. If the
token is a simple construct including parenthesis, comma, or a colon, then it returns an integer
program. If the token is a more complex items including an identifier or another token with a value, the
value is also passed to the parser.

Lexical analyzer separates the characters of the source language into groups that logically belong
together, called tokens. It includes the token name which is an abstract symbol that define a type of
lexical unit and an optional attribute value called token values. Tokens can be identifiers, keywords,
constants, operators, and punctuation symbols including commas and parenthesis. A rule that
represent a group of input strings f or which the equal token is make as output is called the pattern.

Regular expression plays an essential role in specif ying patterns. If a keyword is treated as a token, the
pattern is only a sequence of characters. For identifiers and various tokens, patterns f orm a difficult
structure.

The lexical analyzer also handles issues including stripping out the comments and whitespace (tab,
newline, blank, and other characters that are used to separate tokens in the input). The correlating error
messages that are generated by the compiler during lexical analyzer with the source program.

For example, it can maintain track of all newline characters so that it can relate an ambiguous
statement line number with each error message. It can be implementing the expansion of macros, in
the case of macro, pre- processors are used in the source program.

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