Design and Implementation of a PHP Compiler Front-end
Edsko de Vries, John A. Gilbert · 2007
This technical report describes the design and implementation of a front-end for phc, the open source PHP compiler. This front-end provides an excellent basis for developing tools which process PHP source code, and consists of a well-defined Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) specification for the PHP language, a lexical analyser and parser which construct the AST for a given script, and a visitor and transformation API for manipulating these ASTs. 1