What's the difference between parse trees and abstract syntax trees?

Question

I found the two terms in a compiler design book, and I\'d like to know what each stands for, and how they are different.

I searched on the internet and found that pa

Answer 1

An AST describes the source code conceptually, it doesn't need to contain all the syntactical elements required to parse some source code (curly braces, keywords, parenthesis etc.).

A Parse tree represents the source code more closely.

In an AST the node for an IF statement could contain just three children:

• Condition
• If Case
• Else Case

For a C-like language the Parse Tree would need to contain nodes for the 'if' keyword, parenthesis, curly braces also.