3.1 Chapter Objectives

• Establish an understanding of scanning.

• Establish an understanding of parsing.

• Introduce top-down parsing.

• Differentiate between table-driven and recursive-descent top-down parsers.

• Illustrate the natural relationship between a context-free grammar and a recursive-descent parser.

• Introduce bottom-up, shift-reduce parsing.

• Introduce parser-generation tools (e.g., lex/yacc and PLY).