The most common use of a parser is as a component of a compiler. This parses the source code of a computer programming language to create some form of internal representation. Programming languages tend to be specified in terms of a context-free grammar because fast and efficient parsers can be written for them. Parsers are usually not written by hand but are generated by parser generators.
Context-free grammars are limited in the extent to which they can express all of the requirements of a language. Informally, the reason is that the memory of such a language is limited. The grammar cannot remember the presence of a construct over an arbitrarily long input; this is necessary for a language in which, for example, a name must be declared before it may be referenced. More powerful grammars that can express this constraint, however, cannot be parsed efficiently. Thus, it is a common strategy to create a relaxed parser for a context-free grammar which accepts a superset of the desired language constructs (that is, it accepts some invalid constructs); later, the unwanted constructs can be filtered out.
Overview of process
The following example demonstrates the common case of parsing a computer language with two levels of grammar: lexical and syntactic.
The first stage is the token generation, or lexical analysis, by which the input character stream is split into meaningful symbols defined by a grammar of regular expressions. For example, a calculator program would look at an input such as "12*(3+4)^2" and split it into the tokens 12, *, (, 3, +, 4, ), ^ and 2, each of which is a meaningful symbol in the context of an arithmetic expression. The parser would contain rules to tell it that the characters *, +, ^, ( and ) mark the start of a new token, so meaningless tokens like "12*" or "(3" will not be generated.
The next stage is syntactic parsing or syntactic analysis, which is checking that the tokens form an allowable expression. This is usually done with reference to a context-free grammar which recursively defines components that can make up an expression and the order in which they must appear. However, not all rules defining programming languages can be expressed by context-free grammars alone, for example type validity and proper declaration of identifiers. These rules can be formally expressed with attribute grammars.
The final phase is semantic parsing or analysis, which is working out the implications of the expression just validated and taking the appropriate action. In the case of a calculator, the action is to evaluate the expression; a compiler, on the other hand, would generate code. Attribute grammars can also be used to define these actions.