7.4 WHERE SHOULD NAMES BE HELD?

7.3 ENTERING INFORMATION INTO THE SYMBOL TABLE

Information is entered into the symbol table in various ways. In some cases, the symbol table record is created by the lexical analyzer as soon as the name is encountered in the input, and the attributes of the name are entered when the declarations are processed . But very often, the same name is used to denote different objects, perhaps even in the same block. For example, in C programming, the same name can be used as a variable name and as a member name of a structure, both in the same block. In such cases, the lexical analyzer only returns the name to the parser, rather than a pointer to the symbol table record. That is, a symbol table record is not created by the lexical analyzer; the string itself is returned to the parser, and the symbol table record is created when the name's syntactic role is discovered .