Preliminaries

• What This Module Does - An overview of the syntax module's role and abilities.

• How To Include This Module - What to do to make use of the syntax module in a new command-line tool.

Chapter 1: Setting Up

Loading this module.

• Syntax Module - Setting up the use of this module.

Chapter 2: The Parse Tree

• Syntax Trees - To parse trees which decompose the meaning of excerpts of text, and which allow annotations to be made at each node.

• Node Types - Each node in a syntax tree has a type, which informs whether it can have child nodes, and what in general terms it means.

• Parse Nodes - Syntax trees are made of single nodes, each representing one way to understand a given piece of text.

• Node Annotations - Attaching general-purpose data to nodes in the syntax tree.

• Tree Verification - Did we go wrong anywhere? This section is purely defensive, and tests whether Inform contains bugs of a kind which lead to malformed syntax trees: that should never happen even if the source text being compiled is a dumpster fire.

• Simple Preform Cache - A simple way to speed up repeated Preform parses of the same text.

Chapter 3: Breaking into Sentences

• Sentences - To break up the stream of words produced by the lexer into English sentences, and join each to the parse tree.