When it comes to computers, some programmin languages are compiled – which just means there’s a program called a compiler that reads through whatever code ya write, then crunches it down into the literal ones & zeros that yer computer’s CPU actually understands. That’s why if ya ever open up an .EXE file in a text editor, it’ll just look like a load of gibberish instead of C++ code or whatever. In other words: the programming language is for humans to write, the .EXE is for computers to read, & the compiler is what gets ya from one to the next!
Anyways, one of the things that the compiler does when it looks at a source code file is it organizes the syntax of the code ya wrote into a tree-like data structure. (It’s basically the computer’s equivalent of diagrammin a sentence, if ya ever did that in grade school.)
This data structure’s called an AST, where S stands for Syntax & T stands for Tree. (Sometimes it’s also called a parse tree.) But what does the A in AST stand for?