Compilation
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Compilation is the process of translating code written in a programming language into executable machine code. It consists of 4 steps:
- 1. Lexical analysis: convert source code into sequence of tokens.
- 2. Syntactic analysis: structure tokens into parse tree.
- 3. Semantic analysis: annotate parse tree with semantic actions.
- 4. Code generation: produce the final machine code.
A software program that automatically performs this compilation process is called a compiler.