Speeding Up The Traveling Salesman Using Dynamic Programming
Alarge part of what makes computer science hard is that it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to solving a difficult, seemingly unsurmountable problem. One…
A token of my affection (for my parser)
If ambiguity is the root of all parse tree evil, then clarity is clearly the preferred mode of operation. Sure, we can add disambiguating rules to avoid ambiguous situations that’ll…
Parsing expressions like it’s our job
Okay, so we now know how to diagram and parse an English language sentence. But how does that apply to code? And what even is a “sentence” in our code?…
Grammatically Rooting Oneself With Parse Trees
Thinking about all of the abstractions that surround us in the world of technology can sometimes be overwhelming. This is particularly true when you’re trying to wrap your head around…
Evaluating the important parts
Once we’ve finished scanning our source text and identified our lexemes, we’ll need to do something with our lexeme “words”. This is the evaluation step of lexical analysis, which is often referred to in…
Reading Code Right, With Some Help From The Lexer
Software is all about logic. Programming has garnered a reputation of being a field that is heavy on the math and crazy equations. And computer science seems to be at…
Anatomy of an AST
Now that we know that the abstract syntax tree is important (but not necessarily intimidating!), we can start to dissect it a tiny bit more. An interesting aspect about how…
Condensing one tree into another
Okay, so now we have two trees to keep straight in our heads. We already had a parse tree, and how there’s yet another data structure to learn! And apparently,…
Leveling Up One’s Parsing Game With ASTs
Before I started on this journey of trying to learn computer science, there were certain terms and phrases that made me want to run the other direction. But instead of…
Two translators, both alike in dignity
The differences between interpretation and compilation and their respective translators tells us a lot about how these two programs are implemented. If we compare these two methodologies, we’ll start to…
