lexical analysis


lexical analysis

(programming)(Or "linear analysis", "scanning") The firststage of processing a language. The stream of charactersmaking up the source program or other input is read one at atime and grouped into lexemes (or "tokens") - word-likepieces such as keywords, identifiers, literals andpunctutation. The lexemes are then passed to the parser.

["Compilers - Principles, Techniques and Tools", by AlfredV. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman, pp. 4-5]