6. The Abstract Format

6 The Abstract Format

This document describes the standard representation of parse trees for Erlang programs as Erlang terms. This representation is known as the abstract format. Functions dealing with such parse trees are compile:forms/[1,2] and functions in the modules epp, erl_eval, erl_lint, erl_pp, erl_parse, and io. They are also used as input and output for parse transforms (see the module compile).

We use the function Rep to denote the mapping from an Erlang source construct C to its abstract format representation R, and write R = Rep(C).

The word LINE below represents an integer, and de