lexer-first-phase-compiler-frontend

IN premise — entries/2026/06/21/wiki-Tokenization_lexical_analysis.md

Created 2026-06-21T09:50:11+00:00

Lexical analysis (lexing) is the first phase of a compiler frontend, converting a raw character stream into a sequence of tokens.

Summary

Every compiler must first carve the raw text of a program into meaningful chunks like identifiers, numbers, and operators before it can do anything else with the code. This sets the foundation for all later parsing and semantic analysis, since you cannot build a syntactic structure from an unbroken stream of characters.