Creating and Using the Symbol Table

Chapters 1 and 4 justify the existence of a table which is used by the lexical analyser to correlate multiple occurrences of a single name and is used by the translation phases to convert occurrences of source program names into references to run-time objects. This table is called the symbol table in this book: it is sometimes called a ‘cross-reference table’ a ‘name table’ or an ‘identifier table’. It is used by all the phases from lexical analysis to translation and, as chapter 20 shows, it may be used at run-time to help debug the program. The word ‘table’ is misleading since the information may be stored in a list-structure, a tree, or in any other kind of data structure.