purser

n : an officer aboard a ship who keeps accounts and attends to

the passengers' welfare

parser

An {algorithm} or program to determine the

syntactic structure of a sentence or string of symbols in some

language. A parser normally takes as input a sequence of

{tokens} output by a {lexical analyser}. It may produce some

kind of {abstract syntax tree} as output. One of the best

known {parser generators} is {yacc}.

(1997-07-21)