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An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the text. It is sometimes called just a syntax tree.
The syntax is "abstract" in the sense that it does not represent every detail appearing in the real syntax, but rather just the structural or content-related details. For instance, grouping parentheses are implicit in the tree structure, so these do not have to be represented as separate nodes. Likewise, a syntactic construct like an if-condition-then statement may be denoted by means of a single node with three branches.
This distinguishes abstract syntax trees from concrete syntax trees, traditionally designated parse trees. Parse trees are typically built by a parser during the source code translation and compiling process. Once built, additional information is added to the AST by means of subsequent processing, e.g., contextual analysis.
Abstract syntax trees are also used in program analysis and program transformation systems.
Abstract syntax trees are data structures widely used in compilers to represent the structure of program code. An AST is usually the result of the syntax analysis phase of a compiler. It often serves as an intermediate representation of the program through several stages that the compiler requires, and has a strong impact on the final output of the compiler.
An AST has several properties that aid the further steps of the compilation process:
ASTs are needed because of the inherent nature of programming languages and their documentation. Languages are often ambiguous by nature. In order to avoid this ambiguity, programming languages are often specified as a context-free grammar (CFG). However, there are often aspects of programming languages that a CFG can't express, but are part of the language and are documented in its specification. These are details that require a context to determine their validity and behaviour. For example, if a language allows new types to be declared, a CFG cannot predict the names of such types nor the way in which they should be used. Even if a language has a predefined set of types, enforcing proper usage usually requires some context. Another example is duck typing, where the type of an element can change depending on context. Operator overloading is yet another case where correct usage and final function are context-dependent.
The design of an AST is often closely linked with the design of a compiler and its expected features.
Core requirements include the following:
These requirements can be used to design the data structure for the AST.
Some operations will always require two elements, such as the two terms for addition. However, some language constructs require an arbitrarily large number of children, such as argument lists passed to programs from the command shell. As a result, an AST used to represent code written in such a language has to also be flexible enough to allow for quick addition of an unknown quantity of children.
To support compiler verification it should be possible to unparse an AST into source code form. The source code produced should be sufficiently similar to the original in appearance and identical in execution, upon recompilation. The AST is used intensively during semantic analysis, where the compiler checks for correct usage of the elements of the program and the language. The compiler also generates symbol tables based on the AST during semantic analysis. A complete traversal of the tree allows verification of the correctness of the program.
After verifying correctness, the AST serves as the base for code generation. The AST is often used to generate an intermediate representation (IR), sometimes called an intermediate language, for the code generation.
AST differencing, or for short tree differencing, consists of computing the list of differences between two ASTs. [1] This list of differences is typically called an edit script. The edit script directly refers to the AST of the code. For instance, an edit action may result in the addition of a new AST node representing a function.
An AST is a powerful abstraction to perform code clone detection. [2]
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language. The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language to create an executable program.
In computer science, a control-flow graph (CFG) is a representation, using graph notation, of all paths that might be traversed through a program during its execution. The control-flow graph was discovered by Frances E. Allen, who noted that Reese T. Prosser used boolean connectivity matrices for flow analysis before.
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
In computer science, a compiler-compiler or compiler generator is a programming tool that creates a parser, interpreter, or compiler from some form of formal description of a programming language and machine.
Lexical tokenization is conversion of a text into meaningful lexical tokens belonging to categories defined by a "lexer" program. In case of a natural language, those categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuations etc. In case of a programming language, the categories include identifiers, operators, grouping symbols and data types. Lexical tokenization is related to the type of tokenization used in Large language models (LLMs), but with two differences. First, lexical tokenization is usually based on a lexical grammar, whereas LLM tokenizers are usually probability-based. Second, LLM tokenizers perform a second step that converts the tokens into numerical values.
In computing, code generation is part of the process chain of a compiler and converts intermediate representation of source code into a form that can be readily executed by the target system.
In computer science, a syntax error is an error in the syntax of a sequence of characters that is intended to be written in a particular programming language.
Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that is used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature facilitates writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. This feature is also employed in many programming related contexts, either in the form of colorful books or online websites to make understanding code snippets easier for readers. Highlighting does not affect the meaning of the text itself; it is intended only for human readers.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.
In computer science, a parsing expression grammar (PEG) is a type of analytic formal grammar, i.e. it describes a formal language in terms of a set of rules for recognizing strings in the language. The formalism was introduced by Bryan Ford in 2004 and is closely related to the family of top-down parsing languages introduced in the early 1970s. Syntactically, PEGs also look similar to context-free grammars (CFGs), but they have a different interpretation: the choice operator selects the first match in PEG, while it is ambiguous in CFG. This is closer to how string recognition tends to be done in practice, e.g. by a recursive descent parser.
In computer science, an abstract semantic graph (ASG) or term graph is a form of abstract syntax in which an expression of a formal or programming language is represented by a graph whose vertices are the expression's subterms. An ASG is at a higher level of abstraction than an abstract syntax tree, which is used to express the syntactic structure of an expression or program.
A multi-pass compiler is a type of compiler that processes the source code or abstract syntax tree of a program several times. This is in contrast to a one-pass compiler, which traverses the program only once. Each pass takes the result of the previous pass as the input, and creates an intermediate output. In this way, the (intermediate) code is improved pass by pass, until the final pass produces the final code.
A program transformation is any operation that takes a computer program and generates another program. In many cases the transformed program is required to be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular formal semantics and in fewer cases the transformations result in programs that semantically differ from the original in predictable ways.
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data.
Tree Description Language (TreeDL) is a computer language for description of strictly-typed tree data structures and operations on them. The main use of TreeDL is in the development of language-oriented tools for the description of a structure of abstract syntax trees.
A structure editor, also structured editor or projectional editor, is any document editor that is cognizant of the document's underlying structure. Structure editors can be used to edit hierarchical or marked up text, computer programs, diagrams, chemical formulas, and any other type of content with clear and well-defined structure. In contrast, a text editor is any document editor used for editing plain text files.
The DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is a proprietary set of program transformation tools available for automating custom source program analysis, modification, translation or generation of software systems for arbitrary mixtures of source languages for large scale software systems. DMS was originally motivated by a theory for maintaining designs of software called Design Maintenance Systems. DMS and "Design Maintenance System" are registered trademarks of Semantic Designs.
Semantic dictionary encoding (SDE) preserves the full semantic context of source programs while adding further information that can be used for accelerating the speed of code generation. SDE forms a code-generating loader. It is a form of bytecode combined with a JIT compiler. It is code generation at load time.
OMeta is a specialized object-oriented programming language for pattern matching, developed by Alessandro Warth and Ian Piumarta in 2007 under the Viewpoints Research Institute. The language is based on parsing expression grammar (PEGs) rather than context-free grammar with the intent of providing "a natural and convenient way for programmers to implement tokenizers, parsers, visitors, and tree-transformers".
In computer science, a code property graph (CPG) is a computer program representation that captures syntactic structure, control flow, and data dependencies in a property graph. The concept was originally introduced to identify security vulnerabilities in C and C++ system code, but has since been employed to analyze web applications, cloud deployments, and smart contracts. Beyond vulnerability discovery, code property graphs find applications in code clone detection, attack-surface detection, exploit generation, measuring code testability, and backporting of security patches.