The analysis phases

The analysis consists of three steps (Figure 5).

• The LINEAR ANALYSIS in which the stream of characters making up the source program
  • is read from left-to-right
  • and converted into a stream of words, where a word is a sequence of characters with a collective meaning.
• The HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS in which words
  • are grouped into nested collections (= grammatical phrases) with a collective meaning
  • represented by a PARSE TREE
• The SEMANTICAL ANALYSIS in which certain checks are performed
  • to ensure that the components of a program fit together meaningfully (type checking, type conversion, ...)
  • and to report on errors.

Figure 5: The analysis phases.