ASTbased
ASTbased denotes approaches and tools that rely on an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) representation of source code to analyze, transform, or reason about programs. An AST encodes the hierarchical syntactic structure of code, with nodes for constructs such as functions, statements, expressions, and types, abstracting away details like specific punctuation or formatting. Tools that are ASTbased typically begin by parsing source code into an AST, then traverse and manipulate that tree to achieve their goals. The parsing step must align with a language grammar and may produce a concrete or annotated AST that also carries semantic information.
In practice, ASTbased techniques are used in compilers, static analyzers, refactoring tools, transpilers, and integrated development
Advantages include higher accuracy compared to text-based approaches, resilience to formatting changes, and the ability to
See also: static analysis, refactoring, compiler design, parsing, AST-based tooling.