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ASTs are typically constructed during the parsing phase of a compiler by the parser, which converts the flattened sequence of tokens into a hierarchical tree structure.

Information not included in an AST includes exact code layout, formatting details like whitespace, comments, and parentheses that don't affect semantic meaning.

An AST is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of source code written in a programming language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the source code.

ASTs are preferred because they are more compact, omitting many details that are irrelevant for semantics, and easier to manipulate for the purposes of analysis and transformation in compiler phases like optimization and code generation.

While an AST represents the hierarchical syntactic structure of source code, a CFG represents the order in which code is executed, showing the control flow within the program. AST focuses on syntax, whereas CFG focuses on the flow of control.

The visitor pattern is a design pattern that allows you to define new operations on elements of an AST without changing the classes of the elements on which it operates, facilitating easy addition of features like interpretation, analysis, and code generation.

A Parse Tree represents all the syntax rules of the language as a tree, including the concrete syntax, while an AST abstracts away from the concrete syntax, representing only the semantic information.

Symbol tables are data structures that store information about identifiers, often created and used alongside ASTs to hold context like variable types and scopes, which is crucial for semantic analyses such as type checking and scope resolution.

Nodes in an AST represent programming constructs such as statements, expressions, control structures, and declarations. The nodes are connected in a way that reflects the syntactic structure of the code.

In a compiler, the AST is used during the syntax analysis phase to represent the program structure in a hierarchical form which then can be used for further analysis and transformation.

The leaves of an AST are the nodes with no children, typically representing fundamental elements such as constants, identifiers, or literals in the source code.