In computer science, a symbol table is a data structure used by a language translator such as a compiler or interpreter, where each identifier (a.k.a. symbol) in a program's source code is associated with information relating to its declaration or appearance in the source.
Background[edit]
A symbol table may only exist during the translation process[further explanation needed], or it may be embedded in the output of that process, such as in an ABI object file for later exploitation. For example, it might be used during an interactive debugging session, or as a resource for formatting a diagnostic report during or after execution of a program.
Applications[edit]
An object file will contain a symbol table of the identifiers it contains that are externally visible. During the linking of different object files, a linker will identify and resolve[how?] these symbol references.
While reverse engineering an executable, many tools refer to the symbol table to check what addresses have been assigned to global variables and known functions. If the symbol table has been stripped or cleaned out before being converted into an executable, tools will find it harder to determine addresses or understand anything about the program.
At that time of accessing variables and allocating memory dynamically, a compiler should perform many works and as such the extended stack model requires the symbol table.[clarification needed]