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It helps detect semantic errors like undeclared symbols, type mismatches, and scoping errors by storing and providing access to declarations and their attributes.

In a hash table implementation, symbols are hashed to indices in the table for efficient insertion, lookup, and deletion operations.

They provide necessary information about variable locations, types, and storage to generate machine code or intermediate code representations.

Interpreters typically maintain dynamic symbol tables that are updated in real-time, whereas compilers build symbol tables during compilation for later use.

Type information ensures correct operations on symbols, facilitates type checking, and helps in determining the storage size for variables.

Dynamic symbol tables grow and shrink as the compiler processes blocks of code, while static ones have a fixed size and structure throughout the compilation process.

Local symbol tables contain information about symbols local to a function or block, whereas global symbol tables contain information about symbols that are accessible program-wide.

Name mangling involves creating a unique name for each entity to avoid collisions, especially when supporting features like function overloading.

During the optimization phase, the symbol table can be used to keep track of constant values, identify redundant calculations, and facilitate code improvement transformations.

A symbol table is created during the lexical and syntax analysis phases and used throughout the semantic analysis and code generation phases.

It generally contains the symbol's name, type, scope, and may include details like memory location, parameter info for functions, and visibility.

Symbol tables can aid in garbage collection by keeping track of references to objects, enabling the identification of unused objects for deallocation.

Nested scopes are typically implemented with a stack of symbol tables or a tree-like structure, allowing for the masking of outer scopes by inner ones.

Scope rules of a programming language determine how the symbol table is managed - whether new tables are created for each scope and how identifiers are resolved.