GNU's Not Unix. A self-referential acronym referring to a project started by Richard Stallman with the aim of creating a complete free alternative to the Unix operating system. The component of a compiler that performs lexical analysis. The component of a compiler that performs syntactic analysis.
Syntactic analysis analyses the structure of the input program.
If lexical analysis breaks up the program into words, syntactic analysis understands the sentences of the program. It builds a representation of the sentences for use by the later phases on the compiler. The program consists so far of about 24,000 lines of code and 12,000 lines of documentation. Fortunately the hardest parts are complete so the remaining code should roll out quite quickly. Apart from various utilities to assist with conversion from mainframe versions of Cobol, I have completed a pre-processor, and the key components of the main compiler.