Syntax (programming languages)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. The syntax of a language defines its surface form. Text-based computer languages are based on sequences of characters, while visual programming languages are based on the spatial layout and connections between symbols (which may be textual or graphical).
Intermediate representationAn intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be accurate – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and independent of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program.
Debug symbolA debug symbol is a special kind of symbol that attaches additional information to the symbol table of an , such as a shared library or an executable. This information allows a symbolic debugger to gain access to information from the source code of the binary, such as the names of identifiers, including variables and routines. The symbolic information may be compiled together with the module's , or distributed in a separate file, or simply discarded during the compilation and/or linking.
Translator (computing)A translator or programming language processor is a generic term that can refer to a compiler, assembler, or interpreter—anything that converts code from one computer language into another. These include translations between high-level and human-readable computer languages such as C++ and Java, intermediate-level languages such as Java bytecode, low-level languages such as the assembly language and machine code, and between similar levels of language on different computing platforms, as well as from any of these to any other of these.
Object fileAn object file is a computer file containing object code, that is, machine code output of an assembler or compiler. The object code is usually relocatable, and not usually directly executable. There are various formats for object files, and the same machine code can be packaged in different object file formats. An object file may also work like a shared library.
Application binary interfaceIn computer software, an application binary interface (ABI) is an interface between two binary program modules. Often, one of these modules is a library or operating system facility, and the other is a program that is being run by a user. An ABI defines how data structures or computational routines are accessed in machine code, which is a low-level, hardware-dependent format. In contrast, an application programming interface (API) defines this access in source code, which is a relatively high-level, hardware-independent, often human-readable format.
Lexical analysisLexical tokenization is conversion of a text into (semantically or syntactically) 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 not the same process as the probabilistic tokenization, used for large language model's data preprocessing, that encode text into numerical tokens, using byte pair encoding.
Execution (computing)Execution in computer and software engineering is the process by which a computer or virtual machine reads and acts on the instructions of a computer program. Each instruction of a program is a description of a particular action which must be carried out, in order for a specific problem to be solved. Execution involves repeatedly following a 'fetch–decode–execute' cycle for each instruction done by control unit. As the executing machine follows the instructions, specific effects are produced in accordance with the semantics of those instructions.
Function (computer programming)In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed. Functions may be defined within programs, or separately in libraries that can be used by many programs. In different programming languages, a function may be called a routine, subprogram, subroutine, or procedure; in object-oriented programming (OOP), it may be called a method.
Interpreter (computing)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: Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly; Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that; Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter Virtual Machine.
