On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamingforw...@gmail.com> wrote: > Okay. The purpose of BNF (at least as I envision it) is to > produce/specify a *context-free* "grammar". A lexer parses the tokens > specified in the BNF into an Abstract Syntax Tree. If one can produce > such a tree for any given source, the language, in theory, can be > compiled by GCC into an executable.
Well, not quite. The lexer breaks the stream of characters up into tokens, which are fed to the parser, which produces an abstract syntax tree. From the WIkipedia entry: "In computer science, an abstract syntax tree (AST), or just syntax tree, is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of source code written in a programming language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the source code." Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
