Parsers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A system or tool used to analyze and interpret data or language structures
2. A program designed to break down and organize text for further processing
3. An entity that examines input to extract meaningful information or convert it into a different format

Etymology: A parser is, at heart, a plain piece of English machinery: "parse" with the agent suffix "-er" attached, meaning something that does the parsing. The verb "parse" itself is the more interesting part of the story. It comes from Latin "pars" (part), and in grammar it meant breaking a sentence into its component parts and naming what each one does. Only later did computing borrow that sense, so a parser is, literally, a thing that cuts input into parts. The suffix has a longer ancestry. The "-er" ending descends from Old English "-ere", which in turn traces back through Latin "-arius" and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European roots, and it has been the regular way of making a doer out of a verb for well over a thousand years. Its presence here is ordinary; the surprise lies in the verb it is attached to.

Synonyms: analyzers, interpreters, compilers, decomposers