Editing Abstract syntax (section)

==Uses==
To be implemented either for computation or communications, a mapping from the abstract syntax to specific machine representations and encodings must be defined; these may be called the "[[concrete syntax]]" (in language implementation)<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wile |first=David S. |title=Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering - ICSE '97 |chapter=Abstract syntax from concrete syntax |date=1997 |chapter-url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=253228.253388 |language=en |publisher=ACM Press |pages=472–480 |doi=10.1145/253228.253388 |isbn=978-0-89791-914-2|s2cid=14351497 }}</ref> or the "transfer syntax" (in communications).

A [[compiler]]'s internal representation of a program will typically be specified by an abstract syntax in terms of categories such as "statement", "expression" and "identifier". This is independent of the source syntax ('''concrete syntax''') of the language being compiled (though it will often be very similar). A [[parse tree]] is similar to an [[abstract syntax tree]] but it will typically also contain features such as parentheses, which are syntactically significant but which are implicit in the structure of the abstract syntax tree.

[[Algebraic data type]]s are particularly well-suited to the implementation of abstract syntax.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Corradini |first1=Andrea |last2=Gadducci |first2=Fabio |title=A functorial semantics for multi-algebras and partial algebras, with applications to syntax |journal=Theoretical Computer Science |date=2002-09-17 |volume=286 |issue=2 |pages=293–322 |doi=10.1016/S0304-3975(01)00319-X |issn=0304-3975|doi-access=free }}</ref>