In this article I’ll show you how you can create the abstract syntax tree (AST) of an input stream while parsing it. A parser usually reads various tokens from its input by using a lexer as a helper coroutine and tries to match various grammar rules that specify the syntax of a language (the source language).
Tag Archive: expression
In this article I’ll present to you some common conflicts that usually occur in Bison grammars and ways of resolving these. At first, conflicts in Bison context are situations where a sequence of input can be parsed in multiple ways according to the specified BNF grammar rules.
The following program creates the syntax tree of a mathematical expression in prefix notation. For simplicity, we assume that the terms of the expression are individual characters (digits). Each time the recursive function parse() is called, a new node is created, whose value is the next character of the expression. If the value is a term (digit), we return the new node. However, if it is an operator, we set the left and right pointers to point the tree made (recursively) for the two operands.
To calculate a prefix expression, we either convert a number from ASCII to decimal (in the loop ‘while’ at the end of the program) or implement the operation indicated by the first character of the expressions to the two terms, with a recursive calculation. This function is recursive, but it uses a global array containing the expression and an index number for the current character of the expression. The index number goes beyond each sub-expression calculated.
The following program converts an expression from infix to postfix notation. The conversion is carried out with the help of a stack. For example, to turn the expression (A + B) into the postfix form A B +, we ignore the left parenthesis, convert the A to postfix form, we store the + operator on the stack, we convert B to postfix form and then, when find the right parenthesis, we pop the + operator from the top of the stack. In particular, the following implementation works only for the addition and multiplication of integers.
The following program reads any postfix expression that includes integer multiplication and addition, evaluates the expression and displays the final result on the screen. The program stores the intermediate results in a stack of integers.
The terms (operands) are pushed onto the stack. The operators are applied to the two entries at the top of the stack (the two entries are popped from the stack); the result is pushed back into the stack. Because the order in which the two pop() functions are performed in the expression of this code is not specified in C++, the code for some non-commutative operators, such as the ones for subtraction and division, would be somewhat more complicated.
Efstathios Chatzikyriakidis 