Symbol table

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In computer science , a symbol table is a data structure used by translation programs such as compilers or interpreters , which assigns information such as the place of occurrence, the data type or a pointer to a structure in the memory to each symbol in the source code . The term symbol is used in this context in the sense of identifier .

Usually a symbol table is implemented by a hash table . It can either be built up temporarily during the translation or it can be kept available for a longer period in order to facilitate later troubleshooting, for example with a debugger .

In programming languages ​​such as Lisp , the symbol table plays an additional role because it also represents the central data structure of the runtime system.