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Lexical analysis

Lexical analysis is the process of breaking down source code into a stream of tokens, such as keywords, identifiers, and literals. It's the first step in the glamorous world of compiling or interpreting a programming language, taking in the raw code as input and spitting out a nice token stream for the parser.

How to use it in a sentence

  • I was planning to spend my Friday night partying, but instead I got sucked into writing a lexical analyzer for my new programming language. FML.

  • After 3 hours of debugging, Jane finally realized the bug was due to the lexical analysis phase incorrectly tokenizing "Phteven" as an identifier instead of the literal string "Steven".

If you actually want to learn more...

  • Let's Build a Compiler - A classic series of articles that walks through building a compiler from scratch, including lexical analysis.

  • ANTLR Mega Tutorial - If you want to skip the theory and just generate a lexical analyzer, this tutorial shows how to use the popular ANTLR parser generator.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.

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