Compilation phases and types of use

Although totally transparent to the user, there are many phases in a compiler. The technologies used in these compilation phases will be described in the remainder of this article.

The main phases are :

• lexical analysis, responsible for breaking down the source program into the lexical elements of the language: recognizing the words in the program, the tokens ;

• syntactic analysis, which is responsible for analyzing the language's syntax rules: recognizing that the program is correctly formed by the sequence of words and that the series of tokens respects the language's grammar;

• intermediate formatting" is responsible for transforming the source program into a form that can be easily manipulated by the compiler;

• optimization...